Ina's Holiday Gift Guide
She’d be damned if there weren’t a hungry young journalist out there just waiting to flag her recycled material, shout out how the Barefoot Contessa had gone stale.
As he took another bite of broccolini at dinner, Jeffrey asked, “How about the Le Creuset butter dish?”
That butter dish? Was he out of his mind? Surely he recalled how much Ina had complained about the way that dish’s lid barely fit around the butter she always bought at the farmer’s market. What had Le Creuset expected her to buy, sticks of Land O’Lakes? There was no way she’d list something like that in her holiday gift guide. No way!
As she watched her husband chew, Ina was glad she’d forgotten about the broccolini in the oven earlier and had let it roast ten extra minutes. The tops had gotten extra crispy, which she could now hear Jeffrey’s teeth chomping through. Hopefully it was loud enough in his head that he hadn’t heard her groan at his ridiculous butter dish suggestion.
“Or an apron,” Jeffrey said, plunging his fork’s tines into another broccolini stalk. “Aprons are always a good gift.”
She felt her brows crumble into one another but knew her bangs would hide the sight of her expression. When, exactly, had Ina last worn an apron? Had she ever worn one in front of Jeffrey? Sure, she owned a few, but not for herself—she kept them in the pantry for the occasional special guest on Barefoot Contessa.
Ina cleared her throat and told him, for what now felt like the fourteenth time, “The editor asked me to include things I actually use.” Had she made a mistake in asking Jeffrey for ideas on what to include in the gift guide she’d been asked to pen for Food Network Magazine? Or was this the new normal? She didn’t know which to be more fearful of fading—his memory or his understanding of her.
“Salt!” Jeffrey declared, with a look of “I just completed the Sunday crossword” satisfaction. “You always use salt,” he said with a normally adorable naïveté.
Ina stared at her beloved, her betrothed. It was true that all their 2020 hunkering down had made the clock seem like a suggestion rather than a guideline, but it was just last year she had filmed her favorite kitchen items for the New York Times. It had been hot on the heels of her big Cosmopolitan splash, and she’d gone virtual again, taking the Times on an iPad tour of her barn kitchen. They’d been looking for product endorsements or big-ticket items, but Ina had given them a good healthy dose of “How easy is that?” She’d shown off her kitchen timers, her homemade vanilla, and yes: three kinds of salt. She’d be damned if there weren’t a hungry young journalist out there just waiting to flag her recycled material, shout out how the Barefoot Contessa had gone stale.
Fine, she mused, that’s just fine. She’d wrap a box of Diamond Crystal for Jeffrey for Hanukkah and see if that could pep up his bland ideas.
“Ooh.” Jeffrey gave a sharp wince and rubbed at his bad molar. “Tough,” he said, pointing to his Porterhouse steak.
Ina whisked her own plate to the sink and refilled her wine. Leaning back against the marble counter, she surveyed the kitchen. Well, one of the kitchens. She knew she was lucky with four around the world to call her own, including one just through the backyard. But if all but one disappeared (she couldn’t part with the barn’s, not even in her imagination), she’d still be a cook. Good ingredients: that’s all anyone needed. Good ingredients and a few (or a dozen) vintage cake stands.
“What’s for dessert?” Jeffrey called from the table, interrupting her thoughts with his mouth full of Porterhouse. (Guess the meat hadn’t been so tough after all.) Ina opened the fridge and pulled out the individual trifles she’d so lovingly assembled earlier. She placed his on the counter and, in a move not seen in the Garten household in years, walked away from dessert.
“I have some work to do,” she said.
“Work?” Jeffrey eyed his watch. “But it’s quarter to nine.”
Ina sighed. Ordinarily, she loved their routine—the days apart, the nights together. (At least nights when Jeffrey wasn’t in New Haven.) But now and again, she had to shake things up. Show the world who the Barefoot Contessa really was.
And, evidently, show Jeffrey who she was, too.
“Don’t wait up,” she said, lacing her duck boots. She parted the damp lawn toward the barn, hitting the light switch. As the recessed bulbs flickered to life, illuminating the creamy kitchen, she headed right for the pantry.
But what she found inside may have been enough to prove that she had, indeed, gone stale. She took in her shelves’ contents and wondered. There was a row of timers. A stack of dutch ovens. A gaggle of cake stands, naturally, plus those aprons she never wore, hanging on a hook. And, on the food shelves, the very jar of homemade vanilla extract—good vanilla extract—she’d recommended to the Times last year.
Back on the kitchen counters were tasting spoons and lemons in tidy bunches. The usual countertop contents. Should she have taken it as a sign that she was unwilling to try new things? But wasn’t that part of her appeal? Tried, true, tested—after all, it was hard work getting to the point where she could honestly ask, “How easy is that?” Perhaps Jeffrey’s butter dish suggestion wasn’t so off-base. Maybe she really did need to branch out. Try some new tools. Give the butter dish a second chance.
Speaking of butter dishes—and speaking of tried, true, tested—which butter dish had she finally settled on for the barn? She opened the fridge and reached for the top shelf, feeling around until her fingertips found the cold lid. She pulled it down, and lo and behold—on top of the red dish were the words Le Creuset.
But… she could have sworn it’d been too small. Or had that been the white one from Crate & Barrel? Maybe it wasn’t Jeffrey’s memory or understanding of her that was fading. Maybe it was her own.
A knock at the door pierced the barn kitchen—one rap, two, three. Ina jumped, then turned. Through the window panes, she could see a head of curls shining in the floodlights. Jeffrey. Butter dish in hand, she crossed the barn to open the door.
As Jeffrey held out her portion of red berry trifle like a peace offering, he spotted the Le Creuset.
“You took my suggestion!” he beamed.
This time Ina couldn’t hold back her heavy sigh. She turned away to set the cold dish on the counter.
“I knew it,” Jeffrey said, following behind her after carefully pulling the door closed. “Something’s wrong when my sweets passes up her sweet.” He set the trifle cup next to the butter dish, and the scent of the homemade vanilla rose in a plume.
“You were right,” Ina said begrudgingly. All she’d succeeded in doing was moving her glum mood from one kitchen to another. “It looks like you know me better than I know myself.”
Jeffrey waited; where another man might have rushed to probe at the problem, he applied steady quiet. It was, as always, just what Ina needed. The gift guide, the social media circuit, the disruption of one routine after another over the past year: it all stacked up neatly under Jeffrey’s patient gaze.
“What’s that quote about the five stages of an actor’s career?” Ina said, trying her best to keep it light. “‘Get me Cary Grant!’ turns in to ‘Who’s Cary Grant?’”
“Ina,” Jeffrey said gently. “No one is asking ‘Who’s Ina Garten?’”
“I’m asking,” Ina murmured, surveying the tasting spoons and the timers, the butter dish she would have said didn’t fit her “brand.” That was how she and her publicist talked now: cataloging which activities or items did and didn’t fit under the Barefoot Contessa umbrella. In the chilly barn kitchen with Jeffrey, she could see now how silly it all was. What she couldn’t see was a way out.
“Ina Garten,” Jeffrey said, plucking one of the spoons from her countertop jar and swiping it across the first layer of trifle, “is an excellent cook.” He paused. “An excellent wife.” He dug deeper in to the trifle and held out a quivering spoonful to Ina. “She’s the Barefoot Contessa!” he said, simply, triumphantly.
Ina laughed and leaned in to accept the mouthful—tart berries, rich and heady Cognac cream. “Mmm,” she said. Jeffrey was right yet again. She was an excellent cook.
“You know,” Ina mused as Jeffrey helped himself to another bite of trifle, “you could probably use store-bought pound cake in this. And store-bought jam. But it has to be really good jam.”
“Really?” Jeffrey said, raising his bushy gray eyebrows. “The type of jam you might, say, give as a gift?”
Ina was two steps ahead—she had already grabbed a pen from the drawer, a good jam reminding her of the beautiful berry box that was always in rotation in the summertime, and that reminding her of the containers she loved for storing flour. Tried, true, tested.
She looked at Jeffrey scraping the bottom of the trifle cup and couldn’t decide if it was him or the Cognac that had been her muse. She decided it didn’t matter and pulled her husband in for the last bite—and a berry kiss.
Written by Rebecca Joy and Hurley Winkler