by Allen Salkin
Julia and Wolfgang prepared a guinea fowl and white asparagus gratin. As the Austrian-born chef explained the recipe, he paused and said, “I can’t believe I’m telling Julia Child how to cook. That’s like telling God how to create the world.”
Viewers, whether they knew it or not, were connecting with a number of stars who had grown up in difficult family situations, with bad divorces, alcoholism, or worse. This was true of Rachael, Paula, and Alton. It was as if their own deprivations created a desperation to bond through the comfort of food, one so strong it could reach through the television screen and grab hold of whoever was watching.
Sandra Lee, known as Sandy to colleagues and friends, was looking for her own way up and out. She was also ferociously driven.
Working on one of her first cookbooks, she asked her recipe writer, Denise Vivaldo, about Nigella Lawson. Sandy was interested in understanding how the sultry Englishwoman had managed to transform herself from a journalist into a television star. It was well known that Nigella had perfected her cooking skills while taking care of her husband who was losing a battle with throat cancer. “She has that great backstory—husband died of cancer,” Sandy said. “How do you beat that?”
Sandy had her own backstory. According to her memoir, Made From Scratch, her mother was a prescription-drug addict who once beat her so badly her body was covered in welts; her stepfather was inappropriately sexual with her; and her father, with whom she moved in at sixteen, was arrested for raping his twenty-five-year-old girlfriend. The one pleasant period of Sandy’s childhood was between the ages of two and six, when she and her sister lived with a doting grandmother in Southern California, who kept a clean house and baked for them. She and her grandmother watched The Lawrence Welk Show together. Little Sandy liked how the band’s outfits, often powder-blue suits with ruffled shirts, matched the pastel stage sets. When she and her sister went back to live with their addict mother, Sandy, the eldest, spent her preteen years taking care of her sister and three half siblings.
“Many times in life I have looked up at the sky,” she wrote in her memoir, “and said aloud, ‘Why do I have to go through this?’”
Sandy left college in the middle of her junior year. Tall and blond with high cheekbones and icy blue eyes, she first found work at a clothing store, then sold security systems and 90,000-volt stun guns at home and garden trade shows. Living in an apartment in Malibu, she improvised ruffled curtains out of coat hangers and fabric, and with her trade-show experience, managed to turn her homemade curtain system into a business called Kurtain Kraft. Selling at county fairs, she scrounged together the money to hire Florence Henderson to sell the product on infomercials and, as the business grew, she took on the role of pitchwoman herself on QVC. She was hit with patent infringement lawsuits, and diversified the brand into gardening, scrapbooking, and crafts.
In the late 1990s, Sandy met television host Dick Clark through a talent agent. Impressed by her looks and her poise, Dick’s production company signed her to create a “How-To” lifestyle television show and suggested food should be a focus of it. Sandy enrolled in a two-week course at Le Cordon Bleu, a cooking school in Ottawa, Canada. She learned cumbersome techniques such as how to scrape tendons from a veal chop. When it took her an hour to do four, she decided that this was too time-consuming for many women. Back in L.A., she decided to write a cookbook based on the idea that using some commercially prepared products would give busy women an easier way to cook that would yield gourmet results fast. At a supermarket in 1998, she found herself standing in front of bags of Nestlé’s semisweet chocolate chips. She had a brand name for her approach: “Semi-Homemade.”
Romantically involved with a rich Los Angeles businessman, Bruce Karatz, Sandy hired a series of food experts to work on the book, eventually turning to Denise, a well-known Los Angeles area recipe writer who had helped a number of celebrities write cookbooks, among them the ThighMaster queen, Suzanne Somers, and the Fat Ladies’ nemesis, Richard Simmons.
She self-published Semi-Homemade Cooking in 2001. Her concept was that the recipes would include 70 percent store-bought packaged foods and 30 percent homemade ingredients. The book told people how to make Meaty Microwave Lasagna with a packet of French’s spaghetti sauce mix and Beer Margaritas with Corona, tequila, and Minute Maid limeade. Sandy was featured on the cover, smiling angelically in a cloud-white sweater and a blond bob. “Nothing is made from scratch” the cover copy proclaimed. Dick Clark gave a blurb: “Sandra Lee showed me an amazing new way to cook that everyone can enjoy . . . delicious and quick!”
She followed it up with a new edition of the book in 2002 with a glowing introduction by Wolfgang Puck. Kathleen Finch, of Food Network’s programming department, who had created Unwrapped, saw a magazine article about Sandy the same week she made a promotional appearance on a Halloween edition of Today. Dressed up as Sandra Dee, Sandra Lee was so moved by the sight of Matt Lauer’s bare pectoralis majors in his Siegfried & Roy costume that she placed her hand flat on his chest and exclaimed, “Oh, my God!” as he turned beet red. At one of the Food Network programming department’s regular meetings to kick around new ideas and potential talent, Kathleen pitched Sandy hard. “She’s the answer to working mothers’ prayers,” she said.
The network didn’t want a duplicate of Rachael. They wanted to complement her, to build a stable of approachable new kitchen talent. If the trail back to the kitchen had to be made of Noodle Roni, so be it. The audience research had shown that was enough.
“This seventy-thirty concept is so smart,” Kathleen continued. “And I’d love to make a television series with her.”
Eileen, Kathleen’s boss, agreed. She liked the concept and Sandy’s previous TV experience with Kurtain Kraft.
Although she had been preparing for a breakthrough for years, Sandy was surprised by the call from Food Network. She was calling herself a “lifestylist,” something broader, she thought, than a food expert, and she wanted the show to include more decorating tips. There was some dispute over the format, but in the end every episode of Semi-Homemade Cooking featured a “tablescape,” a fussy-as-Lawrence-Welk decorating scheme for the dining room table—themed napkin rings, color-coordinated tablecloths, printed name cards—to match the food she’d just semi-made. In the first episode, Sandy demonstrated how to wrap a marshmallow with fondant.
Sandy was Noodle Roni with blue eyes, on-camera charm, and a fierce will to create a beautiful dinner table that looked as complicated as something from Gourmet but promised to be easier than a trip to Kmart. It didn’t matter if it was that easy or not. It was a fantasy for those career women who yearned to fulfill some 1950s version of being the perfect housewife, even if, exhausted, they never budged from bed while watching it on weekend mornings.
The name of the Saturday-morning cavalcade of cooking shows was changed to reflect the pedigrees of the new hosts who had not gone to cooking school: In the Kitchen.
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In the same vein, another cookbook author came to Eileen’s attention: Ina Garten, the former owner of a gourmet shop on the East End of Long Island, had published The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook in 1999. Eileen spent time in the summer in East Hampton near the shop of the same name, and was a big fan of the ease, class, and repeatable success of recipes like Perfect Roast Chicken and Pasta, Pesto, and Peas.
And yet, Eileen and Judy had resisted when Eve Krzyzanowski, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia’s head of television, had first pitched Ina as a potential cooking show host prior to 9/11. Just as they had argued against Paula at the time, Ina was neither young nor model-slender.
Ina, fifty-one years old when her book was published, had never envisioned herself on television, but she had been a high achiever her entire life. Before she’d opened the food shop, she had been an analyst in the White House Office of Management and Budget during the Carter administration. Her husband, Jeffrey Garten, whom she’d met when she was fifteen
and visiting her brother at Dartmouth, had worked in Henry Kissinger’s office. In D.C., she’d hosted Saturday brunches, practicing a cooking hobby stoked by her interest in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Then, sitting at her desk in the spring of 1978, she’d seen a tiny ad in The New York Times for a specialty-foods shop that was for sale in Westhampton, New York.
Now that’s something I’d like to do, she thought. She was burned out by Washington and, like a lot of urbanites, dreamed of a more grounded life in the country.
She and Jeffrey drove out to Long Island that weekend. The place was a small shop called The Barefoot Contessa, named after a 1954 movie starring Ava Gardner. It was a tiny operation: one person tended the front of the store, one worked in the kitchen baking bread, slicing salmon, and preparing soups.
She bought the shop with money she’d made buying, fixing up, and flipping two row houses in D.C. The East End of Long Island was idyllic. Its famous beaches and proximity to New York attracted the wealthy during the summer months, and its rich farmland and a long tradition of fishing meant access to amazing gourmet spoils: oysters, fresh corn, tomatoes, and striped bass.
Over the next two decades, Ina moved the store twice to bigger spaces, settling it in East Hampton, a more established year-round community where she and Jeffrey bought a home. By the mid-1990s, with around a hundred employees, she was struck with a feeling similar to the one she’d had in D.C.: I can’t do this one more minute, she thought. I need to do something else.
A friend had told her, “Type-A people think that they can figure out what to do next while they’re doing something, and they can’t.” So she sold the store to two employees, keeping ownership of the building, and made herself an office upstairs. Ina was flummoxed when she faced an empty schedule. She had gone from being responsible for a thousand baguettes at three o’clock in the morning to idling. One Monday morning, when Jeffrey was leaving for work, she said, “I have nothing to do this week.”
“Nothing?” he asked.
“Well, I have a manicure on Wednesday, but that’s it.” From the office, she ordered magazine subscriptions and made lunch dates. One day, Jeffrey suggested she write a cookbook, something many customers had asked her to do over the years.
Well, I’ll just start the process, she thought. It was something to do.
She wrote a proposal and sent it to Roy Finamore, an editor at Clarkson Potter. He had edited cookbooks for Martha Stewart, who had a house in the Hamptons and frequented the shop. Roy bought it. The recipes were based on the ingredients Ina found around her: Corn Cheddar Chowder, Lobster Pot Pie. Martha wrote the book’s foreword.
Ina’s cookbook presented food that looked and tasted great, but was easy to make. In The New York Times, Florence Fabricant wrote, “This is an excellent starter cookbook to set the novice on the path to successful dinners and parties. . . . Bright photographs, by Melanie Acevedo, show exactly how most of the food should look, and illustrations show the differences between mincing, dicing, julienne, and chiffonade.”
The book quickly sold out its first printing of 15,000 copies, eventually selling 100,000 in its first year. Stewart, whose company had gone public in 1997, was trying to get into the business of producing television shows other than her own. Seeing Ina’s sales figures, the Stewart people gave her a column in Martha’s magazine. Eve and Martha also pushed her to try a cooking show. Ina was reluctant, worried about whether she’d be able to cook on camera, but was finally persuaded.
Eve and Ina decided that the most authentic way to present the recipes was to show Ina making them in her East Hampton home. It would give her the air of being a nice home cook, a friendly neighbor who might ring the doorbell and present you with an apple tart.
Ina did not fully realize what shooting at home would mean. A production team showed up at her house in East Hampton in early 2000. A prep kitchen was set up in her yard under a tent. She thought she could protect her rugs and floors from the muddy comings and goings of the crew by putting out a bin of socks and insisting everyone wear a pair when they were inside. But there were more than a dozen people in the crew, and they found it too cumbersome to keep taking off and putting on their shoes every time they ran into the house. The carpets started to fill with dirt, and the lawn under the tent was damaged from all the traffic. Worse, most houses in East Hampton had their own septic systems, and few were suited for heavy use. Within a few days, Ina’s system backed up and the toilets gurgled with brown water. The would-be star of In the Kitchen with Ina was frantically unhappy, and it showed in her performance. She had been given little training—no trip to Lou Ekus. What is the hardest thing for most first-time cooking show hosts to do? Cook and talk at the same time. Ina couldn’t do it. She mumbled and cut her finger badly the first day while slicing vegetables on a mandoline. For some people, the pleasure of cooking is the meditative quality of quietly peeling, slicing, and straining. They don’t have to talk. That was being taken away from Ina. At least one producer got the impression that the real problem was that Ina’s food stylist had done most of the cooking for the book and Ina lacked the kitchen chops to produce camera-ready food, no matter how much time the production crew had given her.
Even if it wasn’t true, the mood was sour. Ina sobbed between takes, upset that she’d agreed to do this, frustrated at her performance, and in pain from the cut. She did not want to be on television anymore and felt that she’d been badgered into it. She was curt with the production staff, who were themselves disgruntled at her inability to stick to the tight shooting schedule, originally aimed at completing two half-hour shows in a day, a tight pace even for a seasoned pro, an impossible pace for someone who needed to stop talking and watch herself chop if she was to avoid cutting herself again.
At the end of the shoot, someone brought in champagne. There was a toast. Ina gave the producers signed copies of The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook. Then she raised her glass and, not joking, said, “Now get out of my house.”
Back in New York, the production team edited together a few weak half-hour episodes. They bought her new carpets. Ina sent the production company a bill for the signed cookbooks. Then Martha saw the tapes. She did not like that Ina was using Fiestaware plates, which looked similar to the dinnerware used on Martha’s show. She did not like Ina’s performance. Martha also seemed unhappy that another woman was going to be the star of a show produced by her company.
“I don’t want to be representing Ina,” Martha declared to her staff at her television studio in Westport, Connecticut. She issued an order. “I don’t want this shown. I want the tapes of this whole series destroyed.”
Eileen had been invited out to watch the taping of the pilot. She saw all the problems, but came away with the impression that there was a way to do something with Ina that would work. The Martha production was awful, but after 9/11, as Rachael Ray’s show became popular, Eileen grew sure that Ina was the kind of cookbook star she wanted to add to the Saturday block, someone who, handled right, could come across as classy and competent. Eileen spent more than a year trying to convince her to try again. But Ina didn’t want to have her carpets ruined again, or spend weeks away from home taping in a studio.
Then Eileen found what she thought was a potential solution. Rachel Purnell produced Nigella Lawson’s cooking show in England, and shot the episodes at Nigella’s home. It showed Nigella’s life, the smart friends she had over to dinner, and her late-night fridge raids. Viewers aspired to live that lush cosmopolitan life.
Nigella Bites looked great because it was not made like a traditional cooking show with four cameras positioned in front of a kitchen counter and taped as the host cooked, shot in real time, and divided into four segments separated by commercials. Rachel Purnell’s company, Pacific, shot the episodes somewhat like a movie. There were only two cameras, and they taped three takes of every move the host made. If Nigella sliced an onion, the cameras might take a long shot. Then sh
e’d do it again and a camera would follow her hands. The third take might be a medium shot, during which she would speak to the camera about what she was doing. The script was more thoroughly written out, requiring less extemporaneous speaking from the host. Because there were multiple cuts and the shape of the episode was determined when it was edited together, many takes were done without any talking. Voice-overs were used. It took two to three days to create twenty-two minutes of television, not including postproduction editing and fine-tuning. The visual result, with its lush cinematic quality and an appealing narrative, showed the care that had gone into its production.
Most important from Ina’s perspective, Purnell’s method required a smaller crew. There were two cameras, one piece of lighting equipment. Six or seven people could make the whole show. Eileen was able to convince Purnell to come to New York for a meeting with Ina. The cookbook author was still very wary of trying TV again, but after seeing how elegant Nigella’s show was, she was willing to listen. Purnell told her that the slow process would bestow a richness on the show that would be more representative of her food and lifestyle. It would have the quality that Ina demanded of the photos in her books.
“I never watch my own shows. Never. I have no idea how it comes together. From day one, I always had enormous confidence that they knew what they were doing. They’re extraordinary. But no, I can’t. If I ever watched a show, I think I’d probably never do it again.”
—INA GARTEN TO INTERVIEWER MAILE CARPENTER
“Please,” Eileen said again and again. “It will be better this time. I promise.”
Ina relented. Purnell and her crew went to Long Island to produce the show, now called Barefoot Contessa. The Pacific crew, as promised, did not destroy the house. The storyline, similar to that of Nigella’s shows, showed Ina living her life, being a hostess in a country setting that seemed like a dream come true for a lot of people.