Ina Garten, the host of Barefoot Contessa and Be My Guest on Food Network and Discovery+, and CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert had a lot to talk about at the Montclair Film Festival on Sunday—and almost all of it involved cooking.
Both had cooking-related books published this month: Garten’s is a memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, and Colbert and his wife Evie’s is a cookbook, Does This Taste Funny?
Best-selling cookbook author and TV host Ina Garten. PHOTO: Courtesy of Montclair Film.
Colbert, a friend and fan, peppered Garten with questions and studiously took notes on her responses. “You’re a role model for me,” said Colbert, who lives in Montclair.
Every night while he’s getting made up to go on air, he and the Late Show crew watch one recipe from her cooking show, he said. “You’re taking one thing and turning it into another,” he told Garten. “That’s what I try to do in my monologue: How do these things go together to make hopefully something cohesive?”
He said he was was “stunned” to find how difficult it was to write a cookbook.
“Does it get easier?” he asked.
Garten, who has published 13 best-selling cookbooks, said that it actually gets harder because “you have to think of new ideas,” she said. When her first cookbook, The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, was an instant success, her publisher asked her to do another. “I was like, okay, I’m really scraping,” she said with a laugh. She decided to do one based on her catering recipes, Barefoot Contessa Parties!, and that, too, was a success.
When Colbert wondered how Garten went from a job in nuclear energy policy in Washington to a career in cooking, she said it was frustration with the slow pace of change in government. “I thought, I can’t do this one more minute, so I’m just going to try (the food business),” she said.
In the early 1970s she took over a specialty food store in Westhampton, New York called the Barefoot Contessa. (Though she thought the name was silly at the time, she ended up keeping it: “It’s elegant and earthy, which is what I feel my style is,” she said.)
Her first weekend in business was Memorial Day weekend, and the store’s stock were cleaned out so quickly that her husband Jeffrey bought up all the baked goods in a nearby Danish pastry shop to sell at the Barefoot Contessa. “I had no idea what I was doing,” she said.
Her decision to move into prepared gourmet foods turned out to be fortuitous. “It was 1970, and the women’s movement had happened, and women had families and jobs and kids and houses to take care of,” she said.
The title of her memoir comes from a friend, the filmmaker Rob Marshall, who was a dance captain in a Broadway show with Liza Minellli decades ago. Minelli told him, “Be ready when the luck happens.”
“It resonated with me,” Garten said. “I’ve been incredibly lucky that along the way each of the things that I’ve done happened to be what the world was interested in at the time.”
Twenty years after opening the store, “I decided to write cookbooks, and that’s when the cookbook business was really booming,” she said. Then in 2000, someone at the Food Network asked her to do a TV show. “I was like, ‘Forget my number, I’m not doing a TV show,’” she says. “And God bless her, she just wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
She’d had no interest in writing a memoir until her friend and memoir co-author, Montclair resident Deborah Davis, told her, “Somebody’s going to write a memoir, and it should be you.”
Writing it “made me rethink my life,” Garten said. “Now when I look back at all of those times when I jumped off a cliff, which I realize now were really scary, I see that they were the making of my life.”
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