Modern Comfort Food summary

Ina believes that nostalgia plays a huge part in the foods we reach for when we need comfort. So when putting together this collection of comfort food, she wanted her recipes to remind people of cozy times from long ago. The trouble is, many retro foods are pretty outdated, with heavy, cloying ingredients that don’t represent the way people want to eat now. 

Take the tuna fish sandwich. You hardly need a recipe to make it: mix tuna with mayonnaise, and put it between two slices of bread. Simple enough. But when Ina polled her many friends about their favorite foods from childhood, so many of them came back with the same answer – a tuna fish sandwich – that she knew she needed to include it. 

Ina loves fancy food. Who doesn’t? She will very happily order grilled octopus or osso buco at a restaurant, and take inspiration from the amazing flavors. But at home, she wants her dinner guests to feel cozy and warm, and leave with memories of the company. The food she serves is primarily to facilitate that – not to steal the show.

When she walks out of the kitchen carrying a big baking dish of steaming, family-style comfort food, like Truffled Mac & Cheese or Baked Rigatoni with Lamb Ragù, her friends’ faces light up. That’s way more valuable to her than impressing her guests with course after finicky course. 

When asked about their favorite comfort food, exactly no one will say steamed broccoli. But vegetables do have the potential to be incredibly satisfying. Just look at Zuni Café in San Francisco. Years back, when Ina and a friend of hers visited the restaurant, owner Judy Rodgers told them that whatever main dish they paired with their buttermilk mashed potatoes would be the most popular that night. In other words, it didn't matter what the main was; the mashed potatoes were the star. Ina was floored – it made her rethink her whole side-dish strategy.

Vegetables have come a long way since Ina’s childhood in the 1950s. Back then, cooks would either boil or steam fresh vegetables into flavorless oblivion, or they’d take frozen vegetables and cover them with melted cheese to make them appetizing. In the 1980s, the trend was to blanch and shock vegetables – that is, very briefly put them into boiling water and then immediately into ice water. The result was vegetables that were neither raw nor cooked. These were better than the mushy, cheesy mid-century vegetables, but they weren’t exactly comforting. 

The first thing to know about Boston Cream Pie is that it isn’t a pie at all. It’s a cake made of two layers, filled with vanilla cream and covered with a chocolate glaze. It’s a beloved all-American dessert, which is right on brand for Ina. The only trouble was, she couldn’t figure out how to make it work with an added orange flavor, which she felt was necessary for the dessert to be a success.

The perfect combination eluded her for years – until she brought it up with Christina Tosi, founder of the dessert restaurant Milk Bar. Christina recommended that Ina soak the cake layers in orange syrup to really imbue the cake with orange flavor. Ina rushed home and tried it, and voilà! She finally had her perfect recipe. Beware: it’s complicated. But, for Ina, the reward is well worth the work.

Ina got her start in the food industry by running a specialty foods store in the Hamptons called Barefoot Contessa. In many ways, it was a lot different from her previous job managing budgets in the White House under President Jimmy Carter. But both jobs could get pretty hectic, albeit around quite different topics. At Barefoot Contessa, the most intense activity didn’t involve yearly deficits, but muffins.

In the summer, cooks coming out of the kitchen with trays of freshly baked muffins would be mobbed by customers. Muffins were plucked right off the trays before they could be arranged behind the counter – people wouldn’t even wait to order and pay! Barefoot Contessa would literally bake a thousand muffins a day and still run out. That’s how good Ina’s muffins are.