Aina Connie.

I'm so happy to meet you.

So much for having me.

I really look forward to this.

What a space.

Thank you.

This is so lovely. Thank you for having us here. This is wonderful. This is your work and this is my office.

Yeah.

So the house is just there. You have a very short, very short commute.

Sometimes the rabbits get in the way, but, you know, usually it's fairly traffic free.

I feel like I know the space because I've watched so many videos.

But you don't have any sense of the scale.

No, you don't.

When I first told Jeffrey I was going to build a kitchen here, I think he imagined, like, a little kitchen and kept seeing this thing go up and up and up, and he was like, what are you building here?

Is it a pleasure to cook in here still?

Oh, it's just wonderful. And I actually think good architecture makes you a better at whatever you're doing. I walk in every day and I think, I can't believe I get to work here. And it just makes me show up more.

You feel happy being in this space. I can see that. And I'm actually quite in when I cook. I'm quite manic about cleaning up as I go along, unlike my husband, who leaves a sort of minor nuclear disaster.

That's me.

How can you cook like that?

Total disaster. And then I just throw everything in the sink and it's a big pile of dishes, and then we work our way through it.

By the way, you have so many cookbooks, and I'm out of the corner of my eye. I collect cookbooks, but nothing like on.

The scale that you do.

Can we have peek? Can we have a look?

Come on.

I love that.

This is my collection of things that I use almost all the time. If I'm looking for what would a good French bavette like a flank steak be? I'll just start looking in French cookbooks and just say, oh, that's interesting. Julia Child would do this and Patricia Wells would do that and just kind of collect information for myself. And then I'll put them all away and just start cooking.

And you still refer to cookbooks?

I do, yeah. I do. Yeah. There's so many great cookbooks. Why not? Okay, let's go and sit.

So we're going to have a drink? Yes, thank you. Thank you, thank you.

I've made some watermelon lemonade. I'm working on it for my next book. So it's a process.

So am I a guinea pig?

You're a guinea pig, exactly.

This is from the garden.

It's from the garden, yeah.

So what have we got?

So we've got watermelon, lemonade, a little strawberry in it, and word over ice. How easy is that?

I think I can do this.

You think I have enough mint here?

I think we could just grow a mint bush in there.

Cheers. So happy to see you thank you.

So much for having us. That's great. I can taste the strawberry.

You can taste the strawberry.

I'm surprised that I can taste the strawberry too.

Not bad. And what I'm always looking for is layers of flavor. Not too many layers, but that you can taste them all the same way. The watermelon, the lemon, and the strawberry.

You get the watermelon first.

Yeah.

And then the lemon. And the hint of strawberry.

A hint of strawberry, right. And then a smell of mint and.

The smell of mint. And it looks beautiful too. How would it be with a shot of vodka in it?

I happen to know, and it's delicious. Okay.

After filming, guys, when we are no longer on public television, we hit it all in there.

I'm wondering if it's a little thick. I might like it a little thinner.

It's slightly slurpeeish.

Yeah. I'm going to try something.

So what would you do? Add a bit more lemonade, more water?

No, definitely not. One more lemon. Let me get some water. We're testing recipes while we go here.

You know what you could do?

What?

Would you ever put a tiny bit of soda water in it?

That's a good idea. Should we do that?

Look at that.

I've got testing recipes for me, that's.

Something I'm going to take home that I encouraged Ina Garten to change a recipe, and she listened. If it's bad, I'm taking no responsibility, by the way.

That's a great idea. I like that.

This is a very at home kitchen. I feel very at home in here.

Floss it around. Yeah, here.

Okay.

Actually, I like the color better. It's a little lighter. Pink. Not a bad idea.

Okay, that's perfect. Mine is perfect. Now refreshing. And I like the bit of soda.

I like the fizzy more refreshing. And that's how I develop recipes.

Small credit.

Yes, exactly. That's nice. Not bad.

More than not bad. Good, right? Let's go and sit.

Okay.

When you look at everything you've done and how your career as a I don't even know how to describe you, and I hate that phrase celebrity chef. So I'm not going to use that.

But first, I'm not a chef.

You are certainly a celebrity. You're a home cook. So what would you say your influence has been? You are incredibly influential. Why? What is it?

Well, thank you. I don't know that I am. But you know what I love? I love when I walk down the street and somebody leans in and says, you taught me how to cook. Thank you. And that, to me, is just it just gives my life meaning that I never expected to have. I wrote a cookbook thinking I would. I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next after I had a specially food store. But I just didn't have anything to do. So I thought, well, I'll write a cookbook while I figure it out. I had no idea that's what I was going to be doing. So it's kind of like my life. You've just got to jump in the pond, splash around and do something and you never know where it's going to lead to. And that it led to a place where the way Julia Child taught me how to cook, I've been able to teach other people how to cook. It's just a great pleasure. It's extraordinary.

And there's something about you, I think, and you've described it as particularly because all your Instagram followers are younger, many of them are younger.

It's a huge range. Isn't a range of people?

I mean, you've got older people, I'm sure, watching your shows from the Food Network from years ago when I mentioned the people I'm interviewing for this show, it's always the young people who said, oh, you're interviewing in a garden. I don't think all of them even cook. I mean, people follow you who don't cook, but it's something about you and your persona. I mean that sounds terribly grandiose, but it is something about your persona that people love.

I think it's accessible. It's not like first carve the pumpkin and then make the pumpkin soup for it. It's like just make pumpkin soup and it's delicious. And people will it's about taking care of each other and I think we need that. And young people don't have like, mom in the kitchen anymore or grandma in the kitchen anymore, so they don't know how to cook. And I think it's just one of life's great pleasures is to cook for people you love. And I think they kind of miss that.

Did you think all those years ago when you were sitting in the White House we have to go back here though because you were in the White House working on nuclear energy policy, working in science, obviously, and clearly something was missing, something drove you to leave. So you're in the White House, you have this job that most people would die for, a job in energy policy and the nuclear energy policy. Well, I wouldn't die for a job in nuclear they wouldn't want me in nuclear energy policy.

But why they wanted me, I don't know.

Clearly did. And yet something was missing.

I think a lot of things were happening at the same time. In my twenty s, I kind of wanted to grow up to be Jeffrey. And he was in the State Department, worked for Kissinger, wrote policy papers. I'm of a generation where women didn't necessarily go to work, right? And so the role models we had were the men that were around us and so I wanted to be Jeffrey. And when I was offered this job in the White House, I thought, okay, this is what I want to do. But then I hit 30 and I just thought, this isn't me, this is Jeffrey. And I love to cook, I love to do renovate old houses. I love the creative stuff, and I was doing that as soon as I got home, but I wasn't doing it. My work. And I saw an ad for a business for Sale, and it was a specialty food store. And I came home and I said to Jeffrey, that's what I want to do. And I think we all need one person to just believe in us. And he said, let's go look at it.

So you threw it in and bought The Barefoot Contestant, and you worked in.

That insanely hard, insanely mean.

The White House must have felt like a breeze by comparison.

Insanely hard, but I loved it. I started 05:00 in the morning. I'd arrive when the bread bakers were arriving, and then I would work in the store all day. Then I would do catering at night. I do, like, five parties at night. I'd come home at midnight or two in the morning, and then I do it all over again the next day. And I just love the energy of it. I love the creativity, and I love that it was mine. I love that instead of $25 billion subjects like nuclear power plants, it was $25, but it was my $25.

I know what it's like, that whole Washington scene, because I live in Washington and kind of know lots of people that work in the White House. It takes quite a lot of courage and self awareness to say, this is not for me, because it's like a kind of it sucks. You in that world where your identity is defined by, I work in the White House and I have a badge, and I can get into the White House and I have clearance, and I'm terribly important. And then to say, actually, I'm going to go and run a shop in the Hamptons, and that takes quite a lot of self confidence.

Well, let's just say my parents thought I was crazy, and they did everything possible to convince me not to do it. But Jeffrey was there going, if you do what you love, if you love it, you'll be really good at it.

You got married at the age of 20, which is young. Even back then.

This was even then. It was even then. It was young.

But you also made a decision, which is not very traditional, which was not to have children, and you made that decision young, too. Talk about that a little bit about you knew you wanted to get married, but you didn't want children. Did you know you couldn't do what you wanted to do if you had them?

I think it's much harder. I don't think that's why I made the decision. I'm actually writing a memoir now, and I'm kind of looking back at my childhood. It was nothing I wanted to recreate. Right. And it's so interesting to look I'm always looking forward to look back and realize a lot of my decisions were based on my childhood. And so I think that was really the motivating factor. And Jeffrey and I were just so happy together.

You make very bold choices.

Everybody wants to know, where am I going to end up for get where you're going to end up? You don't know where you're going to end up. All you know is that if you jump in a pond and you splash around while you're there, you're going to look around and go, oh, that's really interesting over there. I think I'll follow it there and see where it brings you. Somebody described it to me once that if you're in a stream and you keep knocking against the riverbanks, you're in the wrong stream. What you want to do is be in a stream where the stream carries you along. And so I think I'm always trying to find where that stream is, where it's going to carry me along.

I don't know if you felt this. I felt it in my twenty s that I was in a terrible rush.

And that I had to do.

Oh my God. And actually I remember the first time I got pregnant, bursting into tears, thinking, no one's ever going to take me seriously again and I'm never going to work again. And that's it, my career is over. And I wish I could have said to my younger self, it's okay, take your time, lots of time. You talked about Jeffrey and how he's always believed in you. And I know you once said that your mother tried to keep you out of the kitchen. I love the idea that you've made a phenomenal success out of the one thing you were not meant to do.

And is there a connection there? Probably. I'm 75 years old and I'm still saying you can't tell me what to do.

Do you still find it hard, cooking?

Yes, I always find it hard.

So how do you do that? You make it look so easy. And not just that you make it look so easy, you make other people believe they can do it in a way that is easy.

Well, first I've simplified a lot of things. I mean, I make it as simple as I can, but I have such a high standard for myself that it's just like when I have people coming for dinner. The corn is different every single time. It's starchier, it's sweeter depending on the time of year, whether it's from the farm stand or the grocery store. And I have a flavor in my head that I want everything to taste like and a texture. I'm looking for something specific and I'm miserable until I get there. So I think cooking's hard because I'm hard on myself, right? But I mean, I keep doing it. And Jeffrey, once I said to him, why do I keep doing this? Because it's so hard. And he said, I think if it was easy, you wouldn't be interested, you'd be bored, you'd be rest. People think I'm just like, throwing things together 15 minutes before people are arriving. And Jeffrey's, like, chatting away. I'm like, don't talk to me.

And you still have that that's still slight, jumping off a cliff feeling. I have something to show you. Aina can we have to move, though.

Okay.

Is that okay? Cameras, are you happy?

Okay. Wait.

Some photographs.

I like the box of Coke. This is me in a tent in France.

I want the whole story because every time I've read about this story how heaven. A teenage camping trip with a man you love. On no money, on $5 a day.

$5 a day. That's all we had. And we bought a tent. We bought sleeping bag. We rented a car. It was a Renault Cat, and the stick shift was on the dashboard, and it was red, and it rained every it rained every single night for four months that we were on this camping trip. So we would take out the backseat of the car and we'd sleep in the car, and I would cook in the car.

Were you happy?

Oh, my God, I was just so happy. And at the end of the four months, we actually wanted to keep going. And I thought, this is a good sign for a marriage that after four months in a tent that was, like, this tall, we're still having fun together.

Just looks like happiness to me. This one. I know you know this one, but I love it. This is the beginning.

That was the beginning. That was the first store that I bought. It was 400 because I knew nothing. The deal I made with the woman who sold me the store, who was wonderful teacher, is that she would stay with me for a month and teach me how to cook and slice smoked salmon and tell whether the brie was ripe. And I decided I was going to be very creative. And I did all of this new signage, which is, at the time, no, it was very sixty s to have that font and to have the name go straight up.

Tell me about the name The Barefoot Contessa, because originally you didn't like it.

The woman who sold me the store was Italian. When she was a little girl, they used to call her the Barefoot Contessa, which is about it came from a movie. It's kind of a dark movie, but it has an idea of being elegant and earthy. And when I bought the store, I thought, I don't want to call it The Barefoot Contessa. It doesn't say food. It doesn't say where it is, doesn't say who it is. But I didn't know anything about the business, so I thought, I'll just wait for a year and then I'll change the name. And then it didn't matter because people would call me The Contessa. And I think my style really is about being elegant and earthy.

Okay, we have to talk about Jeffrey.

This was Jeffrey in the military. He was aide to the general in charge of the Green Berets. He was a paratrooper. I mean, everybody sees Jeffrey as this incredibly gentle, sweet guy, which he is, but he's also incredibly smart and really good. Wonderful guy.

This is after you were first married and Jeffrey was in the military and you were apart for a year.

Well, he was in the military for four years. One of them, he was in Thailand.

Right.

And so, yeah, I was finishing college. He was in Thailand. And they said dependents couldn't go to Thailand where he was. And I kind of said, okay. And then at some point after I graduated from college, I thought, well, they can't tell me I can't go to Bangkok. So I got myself a flight just by myself. I don't know. Breaker. I'm definitely a rule breaker. And I got myself a flight to Bangkok. And he came to Bangkok and picked me up. And we went to amazingly, there was a Dartmouth Club. He went to Dartmouth a Dartmouth club dinner that night. And we met somebody who said, just come live with us. So I went and lived with them. And I would go back and forth between where Jeffrey was in the middle of Thailand, and I spent, I think, three or four months there.

This is also you and Jeffrey. And I chose this one because this is your time at the White. This is what you got away from.

Yeah, that's what I got away from. And, you know, when I worked at the White House, all I wanted to do is have a job where nobody told me what to do. And I could wear sneakers to work. When you get dressed up every day and have to wear stockings and heels, those blouses. Oh, my God. Got really dressed up. And I just wanted to do something where I didn't have to get dressed up anymore. I did it.

We were talking earlier about what people love about you. I think your marriage to Jeffrey and your love story with Jeffrey.

Thank you.

Don't you think? I think there's something so I got very lucky.

I really did. I think he's incredibly generous. He has this huge heart. He's smart, he's funny, and he really believes in me, and I believe in him. And I said, what more could you want? Exactly. And he's so much fun.

And you have fun together.

We just have fun together.

And I do think for generations of young people who are looking, I think they look at you too. And that's what we all want.

A friend of mine said that any good marriages, each person feels like they get the better deal than the other one. And I think we do feel that way. That's nice. We're off to the market. How's that? You ready?

Yeah, let's go. Let's go.

Ahead. Isn't this great? And they grow all their own everything tomatoes.

Do you come at this time of year and just want to buy everything?

Yeah. And I think we are, aren't we? These are the best. They have the best melons, but their corn is just extraordinary.

Melons look like what I would see in France.

Yeah.

How do you choose a melon?

It's very simple. What you don't want to do is press it because it'll have brown spots. Okay. So what you want to do is just smell it. If it smells like a melon, it's right.

So that one smells pretty, right?

That one's perfect. Perfect. Yeah. So would you like some corn?

I would love some corn.

Let's see here. Hold the bag 1 second. Everybody always pulls that back. The top? Yeah. You shouldn't do that. Yeah, it's fine. Cut the worms off. They're the best. The donut peaches, those I have you ever had them? Oh, we'll have to get I'll have.

To try one or two.

We will definitely have to get some. Will you hold this?

Yes.

See, these two? You can just smell like peaches.

Yeah.

So you know when you buy produce and it's got a little brown spot on it? Yeah. It's because somebody pressed it.

That's because somebody pressed it.

Yeah.

So never press it.

I never press it. Never press just smell. Just smell it.

See that one? I'm not smelling as much.

That's right. Yeah, I'm not either.

The best time of year, isn't it?

For produce? Fabulous. Okay, are we ready? Perfect.

Look at these tomatoes.

Sounds so good. Beautiful. Yeah.

The ones I love are these ones. The ones that are slightly me too. Yeah, they're flavorful.

Aren't they gorgeous, fab.

And look at all that salad.

Gorgeous. So I don't know how we're going to check out because I have no money at all. Does anybody have money?

Thank you. This is wonderful. People running in. Okay.

I like that. That's very nice. Thank you so much.

I'm assuming with the corn, this is all for you. Thank you.

It's a very tiny going home gift. And peaches.

Do you have any advice on the corn? What would you do?

I would just put it in a pot of boiling water for, like, seven minutes. Boiling salted water for seven minutes. Butter or not even butter. Definitely butter.

Butter?

Butter is what makes everything better. Right?

Butter makes all the difference.

Will you come back?

And I will spend another day with love to thank you.

Ayanna. Thank you. That was so much.

Thank you.

I've got to give you back. Wonderful.

That was really just the nicest day.

Thank you. It was a sweet one.

Thanks for being so kind and generous.

Oh, don't be silly. And thank you for coming and for.

All of the tips.

I think we shared lots of tips.

Thank you.

Thank you so much. So good to see you. Bye, Katie.