Ina Garten cooks her way through the pandemic

Ina Garten’s house, on a side street in the stately, manicured village of East Hampton, was just the way you’d want it to be on a sunny morning in October. By which I mean the lawn was a beautiful rumpled green, and the garden was full of cherry tomatoes, and she was wearing a loose button-down shirt and smiling as she brought me coffee in a hotel-style silver carafe. All appeared just as it does on her television show, “Barefoot Contessa,” that has been shot here since 2002.

And I was there this fall because of a sneaking suspicion that, although Garten — Ina to her fans — has become a queen of quarantine cuisine, we don’t exactly cook from the same pantry.

For a person who had been enclosed in a New York City apartment for seven months, with one end of the kitchen table functioning as my office and the other end as dining room, wandering through her “barn” — a lofty kitchen with two dishwashers and 25 feet of limestone counter space; a sunlit reading room full of cookbooks and couches; a spotless, roomy storeroom lined with fully organised staples — was like floating in a soothing dream.

The Contessa’s quarantine is not our quarantine. Her kitchen is not our kitchen. But this year, her Thanksgiving is pretty much our Thanksgiving: tiny and improvised, without the guardrails of tradition we usually rely on for a holiday dinner.

That could mean her recipe for roasted turkey breast infused with the flavours of Italian porchetta: garlic, fennel seed, sage and rosemary. The lemony mashed potatoes that she reverse-engineered from a restaurant dish that caught her fancy in Paris. In any case, she will be sticking with her perennial no-stuffing policy, making a savoury bread pudding instead.

“I hope people will give themselves permission to do whatever they want this year,” she said.

Garten, 72, has published 12 cookbooks in 18 years, produced 18 seasons of her show on Food Network, and steadily built up a following that puts her among the most popular culinary figures of the last two decades.

Her official fan club’s page on Facebook is not a group that just anyone can join. First, supplicants must make it clear that they are part of the Ina personality cult by answering two key questions: What is the name of her husband, and what is the one herb that she cannot bear? If you replied “Jeffrey” and “cilantro” before even reading the questions to the end, congratulations. You, too, are an Ina superfan.

As a reporter, I have spent a lot of time over the same years wondering exactly how a wealthy white woman with no unique culinary skill or television shtick built such a diverse and devoted following. At her house, the answer was revealed in the first five minutes.

“I find cooking hard,” she said. “I’m not a trained chef. I love cooking, but it is not easy.”

It’s a simple truth, but shared by most home cooks. And that’s what she brings to the screen, combining the enthusiasm of a student and the authority of an expert.

If what you want from a cooking teacher are ways to get dinner on the table in 30 minutes while also exploring a global pantry, Garten is not your go-to television chef. If what you want is to cook food the way they do at the upscale bistro where you already spend your disposable income, she is very probably for you.

She adapted to the pandemic energetically, opening her freezer and pantry (via pictures on Instagram) and asking, “Does anyone have something they don’t know what to do with?” She has gained 1 million followers since March.

It was the first time she had invited regular contact with her fans, and she learnt a lot. No one was actually using dried beans. Sourdough was over quickly. A recipe for Overnight Mac and Cheese crashed her website.

On April 1, she posted a video of herself making a Cosmopolitan cocktail that begins with a full litre of vodka and ends with her sipping out of a martini glass as tall as a garden gnome. More than 3 million people have watched it, embracing the larky side of her teaching persona.

“That was it for me, I was hooked,” said April Franklin, 26, a new follower who lives in Rockville, Maryland. “She’s like a mom, but I want to listen to her when she tells me what to do.”

“She looks like us,” said Deborah Torres, 61, a retired teacher in Tucson, Arizona, who is a longtime fan. “She knows what she’s good at, and she stays in her lane.”

There are some signatures to an Ina recipe. Her hybrids — like waffle-iron hash browns, cacio e pepe gougères and Caesar grilled fish — are successful not only because she thinks them up, but because she painstakingly makes them fit together.

She salts like a restaurant chef, and gives exact measurements instead of relying on the phrase “to taste” — usually a lot more of it than home cooks think they can, or should, use. She is lavish with fats: butter, heavy cream, pancetta, cheese, sometimes all of the above. Then she often slips in small hits of vinegar and citrus, to wake up the flavours. There is at least one recipe in each book for a piece of meat that will cost more than anything else on your table, including the silverware.

Her first book, “The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook,” published in 1999, is a culinary time capsule, preserving the recipes from Barefoot Contessa, the food store she ran in the Hamptons from 1978 to 1996, when the neighbourhood was still a place to escape urban hassles like parking tickets and dress codes. Paul McCartney or Annie Leibovitz might stop to pick up sandwiches on the way to the beach, or post-aerobics class for iced coffee and banana crunch muffins.

“Turkey meatloaf, barbecued chicken and orzo with roasted vegetables, and coconut cupcakes,” said Antonia Bellanca, who owned a flower shop a few doors down in East Hampton and worked on many of the same parties that Garten catered. “I still wish that I could stop there every Friday night and buy food that I know everyone will like.”

As a caterer, she built a reputation as a reliable perfectionist, and in its heyday, Barefoot Contessa helped define “the Hamptons” to the world outside, made it an international destination and established a style of beachy, casual luxury that persists there today (at a much higher price point).

When she and Jeffrey went into lockdown in March, the work did not stop. In addition to becoming her own social media manager, she has taken over production of her new show, “The Best of Barefoot Comfort,” acting as her own hair and make-up team, camerawoman, director, audio tech and food stylist.

Normally, her work kitchen operates — with two full-time assistants — like a never-ending assembly line, churning out three different recipes at a time.

One recipe is in the early stages, on which she is sharpening the flavours and coaxing the textures until they fit the ideal in her head. (This is why her profiterole and Boston cream pie recipes took years to perfect: three different components — custard, chocolate, cake — that have to work individually and together.) Another is in early testing, where she hands her version to an assistant with home-cooking skills, watches closely to see what mistakes are made and rewrites accordingly. A third is in the last stage, being tested by a professional and styled for photography. Overall, several people who have worked with her said, each recipe is tested 10 to 12 times before publication.

This system ensures that — reassuringly — nothing changes much in Inaworld. Her favourite Le Creuset pots are still the same colour (the original red-orange, called “flame”) and she sticks to simple, white serving dishes. Every cookbook looks pretty much the same as the last, and is likely to hold a roast chicken, a beef fillet, a root vegetable gratin, a bitter salad, a flourless chocolate confection.

Roasted carrots appeared in her very first cookbook and reappeared in her most recent one, “Modern Comfort Food,” published in October and currently on top of the New York Times best-seller list. As we did prep work for the new version of the recipe, which includes orange juice and balsamic vinegar, I asked if she had some multicoloured carrots, to make the photographs pop.

“You’re talking to the Barefoot Contessa here,” she said, showing the first flash of sass I’d seen all day and heading to the fridge. “Of course I have all the carrots.”