Ina Garten
Ina Garten left a job in the White House to run Barefoot Contessa, which helped launch her cooking career.
Nathan Congleton/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images
  • Ina Garten recently opened up about why she quit her prestigious job at the White House in the 1970s to run Barefoot Contessa. 
  • Garten had worked under both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, helping to write the nuclear energy budget. 
  • But a month after she turned 30, Garten quit and bought the small Barefoot Contessa shop — despite having no food business experience. 
  • Garten credits the shop with informing her future cookbooks and teaching her that, at home, people “want simple food.” 
  • Visit Insider’s homepage for more stories.

It was her husband Jeffrey who helped inspire Ina Garten to take the life-changing plunge. 

The year was 1978, and Garten was considering leaving her job at the White House — where she had helped write the nuclear energy budget during Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter’s presidencies — to buy Barefoot Contessa, a small specialty food shop in a New York town she’d never even been to before. 

Garten’s parents couldn’t believe she would ever give up her prestigious career to run a grocery store. But the upper echelons of DC had never felt like home. Garten had just turned 30, and she wanted to follow a dream that felt like her own. 

“Jeffrey said, ‘If you love it, you’ll be really good at it,'” Garten, now 72, told the New York Times’ Sam Sifton during their recent virtual chat for the release of “Modern Comfort Food,” her newest cookbook. “And that’s the best advice anybody ever gave me.” 

Then there were the Washington, D.C. days, when we both worked in the government. We were very serious!! This is when I taught myself how to cook from Julia Child’s books… the beginning of it all!

A post shared by Ina Garten (@inagarten) on Dec 19, 2018 at 6:38am PST

But the beginning wasn't easy. Garten had no experience in the world of food. She'd only started cooking a few years prior, teaching herself with the help of Julia Child's recipes.

"Honestly, the first month I was there I thought, 'This is the stupidest thing I've ever done in my life,'" Garten told Sifton. "I'd never been in the food business, I didn't know how to do anything. But Jeffrey said, 'If you could do it in the first week, you'd be bored in the second week."' 

Garten began working 18-hour days to turn Barefoot Contessa into a success, bringing on a chef named Anna Pump to help.

Barefoot Contessa store
The Barefoot Contessa store in East Hampton, New York, is seen here in 2002.
Matthew Peyton/Getty Images

"Mom was hired to cook, but the beginning of a beautiful friendship began," Sybille van Kempen, Pump's daughter, told Insider. "Mom and Ina motivated each other. They shared ideas and supported each other's growth." 

Garten credits Pump — who, alongside her daughter, ran the popular Loaves & Fishes Foodstore in Sagaponack, New York, until her death in 2015 — with teaching her "so much about cooking," including making the perfect cheese board. 

"I remember a customer asked me to do a cheese platter," Garten told Sifton. "Anna walked over very quietly and she said, 'Take everything off that platter. Put a big bunch of grapes in the middle, put the cheese around it, do blocks of color, and then stop yourself."' 

Ina Garten and Anna Pump
Ina Garten is pictured here with Anna Pump.
Sybille van Kempen

"That's what she taught me," Garten added. "That the simpler things are the more elegant ones. I miss her terribly." 

It was those first Barefoot Contessa customers who would help inform Garten's future cookbooks decades later, teaching her that "people eat differently at home than they do in restaurants," she told Sifton. 

"I would put out chickens with fresh herbs and it didn't work," Garten continued. "I thought, okay, I'm going to take this huge platter and put the chicken in little red cups and do it really simply — and it sold like crazy. I really learned that people want simple food." 

Barefoot Contessa became a huge success. Garten eventually moved the store from Westhampton Beach to East Hampton, running the store for 18 years before she sold it to two of her employees in 1996. Three years later, Garten published her first cookbook — "The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook" — with recipes from her store. 

Barefoot Contessa store
The interior of Barefoot Contessa, as seen in 2002.
Matthew Peyton/Getty Images

Garten has released a cookbook every two years since, turning herself into a household name with recipes that are accessible to home chefs at any skill level. 

The Food Network star told Sifton that she achieves this by always testing her dishes with an inexperienced cook.

"Every time I make a recipe, I watch someone else make it," she said. "And I learn so much about how someone uses the recipe. At least one person makes it, sometimes three." 

And Garten is often looking for new ways to comfort her fans, posting easy pantry-friendly dishes during lockdown and showing them how to mix a cosmo at 9 a.m. 

She even decided to make comfort food the theme of her newest cookbook because she knew it'd be released during an election year. 

"Two years ago I thought, there's going to be an election a month after this book comes out," Garten told Sifton. "And everyone, no matter who you're voting for, is going to be stressed out." 

"I had no idea the layers of stress we would be dealing with now," she added, referring to the pandemic. "Either I'm a genius or I'm really lucky, and I'm sure it's the latter. It was the right thing for the right time." 

Or maybe it's just like Jeffrey said. If you love something, you're going to be a success.

Read the original article on Insider