Ina Garten’s Love for Cooking Started While Camping in Paris with Her Husband
In my mind, I think that every great chef started cooking during their youth — you know, when it’s the biggest deal to help stir or take something out of the oven. But for Ina Garten, that isn’t so much the case. And as I heard Ina Garten’s story over time, it made me love her even more. With 12 cookbooks and countless episodes of “Barefoot Contessa” that you could binge-watch for months, Ina Garten’s surprisingly late start in the kitchen is worth talking about. And during her recent sit-down with MSNBC’s Willie Geist, she did exactly that.
Stating that her love affair with cooking began during a Paris camping trip (I know, camping in Paris sounds fab, right?) with her husband, Jeffrey in 1971, the celebrity chef told Geist that the four-month rendezvous — and a book titled “Europe for $5 a Day” — is what changed everything for her.
“We bought a car in Paris and spent four months camping in a Day-Glo orange tent that you couldn’t stand up in,” she told him with a laugh. “You had to get out of the tent to put your blue jeans on. I don’t know what the other campers saw.”
Well into Ina and Jeffrey’s camping trip, a stop in Normandy led to a dinner invite from their campsite’s owner to enjoy coq au vin (braised chicken in wine with mushrooms). Calling it “the most delicious thing” she had ever eaten, Ina was determined to figure out how to make the meal and as a result, that one dinner forever changed Ina’s life.
Their trip came to an end, but something about that coq au vin sparked Ina’s curiosity for the world of food. With the help of Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” cookbook, Ina learned to cook under the tutelage of the culinary pioneer from afar.
Several years of cooking later, Ina made a career change and left her White House position to open Barefoot Contessa — a specialty food store in the Hamptons. And, quickly after cookbooks and cooking shows on the Food Network became her reality.
This isn’t the first time that Ina has mentioned her $5 budget-camping adventures and the impact that it has had on her love for the culinary world. The best-selling author discussed how that one trip changed her thoughts on food in her 2016 book “Cooking for Jeffrey” and mentioned how the entire $5 had to be budgeted to include fees for the car, gas, and camping fees. (Can we take a minute and cry about inflation?)
Somehow, even after years of recipe-making, Ina has more cooking genius to give us. She just inked a new deal for “Be My Guest,” a new series that will air on Discovery Plus and Food Network, along with a podcast.
“I’m welcoming really fun, interesting people into my barn in East Hampton for good food and conversation,” Ina shared in a statement about the multi-platform series.
“Be My Guest” is set to air in 2022, but in the meantime, you can catch the newest season of “Barefoot Contessa: Modern Comfort Food,” on Food Network beginning Sunday, October 31 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern.