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Modern Comfort Food summary

Name: Modern Comfort Food
Rating: 4.2 (14 reviews)
Author: Ina Garten

Ina Garten

A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook

4.2 (14 ratings)

19 mins

Table of Contents

Modern Comfort Food
summarized in 6 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? A cozy journey through your favorite dishes, updated for modern times.

As author Ina Garten says, you can be miserable before eating a cookie, and you can be miserable after eating a cookie. But you can’t be miserable while eating a cookie. Sure, this is mostly a joke, but there’s an element of truth, too. Food has an uncanny ability to make us feel better. And we’re not talking about steak tartar and truffled potatoes Dauphinoise. The type of food we crave when we’re going through a rough patch is simple and familiar, like a hamburger and french fries, or a big bowl of beef stew. That’s American comfort food.

In these blinks, learn to recreate the homey favorites that Ina makes for her family and guests alike. With delicious options for every time of day – from breakfast through cocktail hour and, finally, dessert – you can invite comfort and warmth to any meal.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why letting your guests serve themselves is cozier for everyone;
how vegetables have gone from unpleasant to transcendent; and
what running the Barefoot Contessa store had in common with working at the White House.

Casual cocktails

A few years ago, Ina and her husband Jeffrey were invited to a fancy dinner party. There were butlers serving hors d’oeuvres on silver platters, and the dining table was laid with six sets of silverware and wine glasses. Ina found this kind of formality distracting. Everyone at the party was scintillating company, but she was so worried about knocking over a wineglass or using the wrong fork that she couldn’t properly connect to the other guests.

At Ina’s cocktail parties, she keeps things super casual so people feel relaxed. At a recent party in her barn, she set out platters of roasted shrimp with cocktail sauce and big baskets of store-bought cheese straws. The one thing she cooked was cacio e pepe cheese puffs, so the place smelled amazing when people arrived. Her guests helped themselves to huge tubs filled with ice and bottles of California rosé and wandered around the garden, chatting as music played. Ina had a great time, too, because she didn’t have to worry about rushing around to refill everyone’s glasses.

Ina’s cacio e pepe cheese puffs are inspired by the ones served at a favorite restaurant, Lilia, in Brooklyn. To make them, first preheat your oven to 200°C. Then, heat one cup milk, 110 g butter, and one teaspoon each of kosher salt and freshly ground pepper in a saucepan over medium heat. Next, add one cup of all-purpose flour, and beat vigorously with a wooden spoon until the mixture comes together. Turn the heat down to low, and cook for two minutes, stirring constantly.

Next, put the mixture into the bowl of a food processor. Add four eggs and a half-cup each of freshly grated Italian Pecorino and Parmesan. Pulse until thoroughly combined.

Line two baking sheets with parchment paper, then spoon the mixture into a pastry bag fitted with a plain steel tip – Ina’s is 1.5 cm in diameter. Squeeze the dough onto the baking sheets in mounds about 2.5 cm apart. They should be about the size of fat Hershey’s kisses. Finally, use a wet finger to press down the swirl on top of each puff to make them rounded on top.

Before putting them into the oven, brush each puff with egg wash – that’s one egg beaten with a little water or milk. Then, sprinkle with Pecorino, salt, and pepper. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, rotating halfway through for even browning.

Homestyle favorites, reimagined

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.

Cozy dinners with friends

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.

Eat your (roasted) vegetables

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.

Ina vanquishes her enemy: Boston Cream Pie

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.

Muffin mayhem

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.

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What is Modern Comfort Food about?

Modern Comfort Food (2020) is Ina Garten’s twelfth cookbook, focusing on all-American homestyle favorites to make us feel cozy and cared for. With her trademark chic yet relatable Hamptons style, Ina serves up comforting recipes for every meal of the day, from breakfast to cocktail hour to dessert.

Who should read Modern Comfort Food?

Anyone who isn’t into fancy food
People craving cozy vibes
Those wanting to get good and hungry before lunch

About the Author

Ina Garten is a beloved American cookbook author, Food Network host, and celebrity chef. She started her career in food with an incredibly popular specialty foods store in the Hamptons called Barefoot Contessa. In her Food Network show of the same name, she went on to charm millions of viewers with delicious, familiar meals cooked for her husband Jeffrey.

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