Ina Garten

Ina Garten is an American food writer, television presenter and the host of Food Network's 'Barefoot Contessa', the longest-running food programme on the network. Born in Brooklyn in 1948 and trained as a nuclear-policy analyst at the White House Office of Management and Budget under Presidents Ford and Carter, she made a celebrated mid-career switch in 1978 when she bought a small speciality-food shop called The Barefoot Contessa in Westhampton, New York, sight unseen. She ran it for the next eighteen years before selling the business in 1996.

Her first cookbook, 'The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook' (1999), drew on the shop's bestselling recipes and immediately became a New York Times bestseller. Twelve more cookbooks have followed, all of them bestsellers — a publishing record that few food writers anywhere can match. 'Barefoot Contessa' premiered on Food Network in 2002 and is still in active production more than two decades later, holding multiple Daytime Emmy Awards along the way.

Garten's style is the opposite of fashionable: roast chicken, beef tenderloin, perfect mashed potatoes, lemon chicken with capers, a brownie that takes a kilogram of butter. She has stated repeatedly that the audience deserves recipes that work the first time, every time — and she famously tests every recipe in her books at least five times before publication. She is also, in interviews, a calm, unaffected presence — qualities that have made her something of a cultural shorthand for sane domestic life in the U.S. media.