On Barefoot Contessa, and Eating (Like) The Rich
"For the first time in my life, oh how upper-middle class I felt."
July 13, 2017
Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts
I was 22 years old
On the unpaid internship front, I spent $27 on an Uber to deep JP for an interview with 826 Boston—a non-profit that offers writing classes to students in Roxbury. A kid my age interviewed me. I creeped on him beforehand and saw we had a few Allston scenester friends in common. He was dazed in that arty MassArt kid kind of way. I thought the interview went horrendously. As usual. But actually. Even fucking up his final “fun” question of whether I had any hobbies. I said cooking and he asked what kind. To which I said, dead serious, at this interview assessing my skills to work with an underserved community, “Well, I watch a lot of Barefoot Contessa. So, you know, Hamptons-y French stuff?”
September 20, 2023
Brooklyn, New York
I am 29 years old
With a tail between my legs, in hushed tones and with great embarrassment, I have something to admit. Not that I was ill equipped and unprepared for this failed internship. That much should be no surprise. Rather, my ugly truth is this: I’m watching a lot of Barefoot Contessa on a certain streaming platform I refuse to call “Max”—and I’m loving it. For shame! For shame! Austin, my boyfriend, never quite understands why I’m so repulsed by the evolution of the brand. Pointing out to me, any chance he gets, that despite all the recent mergers and acquisitions, “Look! See: ‘HBO Original.’ There’s still HBO.” After many an argument, we’ve agreed to disagree. (I’m right.) Because, truly, it is a shanda. The foremost name in quality programming sullied by wheeling and dealing shareholders, beholden to their dividends rather than to properly gatekeeping Carrie, Claire, and Carmela from the wretched streaming masses. Envision my disgust, the first time I pulled up the app, cyberly greeted by a homepage banner for And Just Like That… followed immediately by thumbnails for things called Sister Wives and Bobby’s Triple Threat. A profound weariness settled in my bones. It all felt so ugly, so flat, this product of bozo billionaires who get to decide that there just isn’t an audience anymore for anything, dare I say, “smart” or “adult.” Clicking around, I was actively deciding whether this was the prophetic fulfillment of Reagan’s America or the end of our empire altogether when—oh my God. Oh my God! Barefoot Contessa! Nineteen seasons of Barefoot Contessa?! Holy shit!
With Austin working late that night and the apartment to myself, I could press play on that first episode of Barefoot Contessa without any need to curb my enthusiasm. So to speak. I can recognize how HBO falling under the ownership of something called “Warner Bros. Discovery Global Streaming & Interactive Entertainment” is just the latest glaring example of our second Gilded Age (again: so to speak). And yet. “You can be miserable before you eat a cookie, and you can be miserable after you eat a cookie,” I squealed in perfect unison, one hand down my pants and the other shoveling fistfuls of peanut butter-filled pretzels down my gullet, “but you can’t be miserable while you’re eating a cookie!” If there are 22 minutes per episode and 60 minutes in an hour and I managed to finish an entire season in one sitting, well, you do the math.
Hearing Austin open and close the front door, I feasibly had the time to pull up something more squeaky-cleanly aligned with my politics. An eight-minute Nigerian short on Criterion or, I don’t know, the book on my nightstand. But Ina was halfway through telling the story about hiring T.R. at 15 years old to work in her specialty food store and—my eyes filled with tears over this decades-long bond between fruit and fly—I could hardly make sense of the remote. While I was prepared to pull out the classic Get Out of Jail Free card (“there is no ethical consumption under late capitalism”), there was no need. Within seconds, Austin was cackling right along with me, ooh-ing and ah-ing at her recipes, almost as charmed as I was by this bobbed, button-upped home cook who, really and truly, lives the life.
Of course, I’d already seen every single one of these episodes. Multiple times. And then some. Growing up, my after-school extracurriculars were as follows: The Tyra Show at three o’clock, Oprah at four, and Barefoot Contessa at five. These three women each fed me something different but, all the same, filled me up. It was under Ina’s tutelage that, by high school, I was making dinner most every night for my family. Fourteen years old and fed up with my full-time working mother’s inability to whip together a unique nightly protein, vegetable, starch, and salad, I took over. Knowing my only chance of eating the meals I really wanted was if I cooked them myself. My mom, of course, was thrilled, my whole family was. She’d still need to buy the groceries, victimized by my dire urgings via voicemail to pick up “good olive oil” and $19 thimbles of saffron—“It’s the stamens of crocuses, it’s gonna be pricey!” But even then, a small price to pay in exchange for getting home and sitting down, however many hours later, to a nice meal. “Everything tastes better when you’re not the one who had to cook it,” said my mother, more times than I could count, sufficiently singing the praises of this Barefoot Contessa recipe as prepared by her somehow-still-closeted son. Famously, gay men are attracted to Ina like moths to a charcoal briquette flame so perhaps that’s the beginning and end of it. But this novice child cook that I was, I would’ve had a far easier time preparing recipes from Giada, or Rachael, or—God forbid—Sandra Lee. But it was in the whole foods and full fat of Ina’s dishes, in its indulgences and richness, in her richness that I saw something I was hungry for.
This desire to do the cooking for my family reared its head shortly after our move to New Hampshire. How obvious. Downbeat and uprooted, a blossoming homosexual stranger in a strange land, I was 13 years old and almost in pain for how little agency I had over my own life. But if I couldn’t manifest a reality where all of us were all together in the same place as always, what I could do is preheat the oven to 400 degrees and roast a peeled and cubed butternut squash, all the while sauteing pancetta and shallots before adding one-and-a-half cups of arborio rice, deglazing with a nice white wine and stirring in two ladle-fulls of hot chicken stock at a time, finishing it off with the squash and a cup of Parmesan cheese. I’d turn off that burner and feel so accomplished, so in charge, and so deliciously moneyed. Too indebted to keeping up as hostile a front as possible, I would never have admitted this to my parents then. But, for the first time in my life, oh how upper-middle class I felt.
In New Jersey, my classmates’ parents commuted into Manhattan and held executive positions too white collar to explain. Meanwhile, my explanation of my parents’ work usually went as follows, “No, they don’t own Pathmark, they work there. My mom’s in seafood and my dad’s the store manager. No, a store manager. A manager of one store.” But then we got to New Hampshire. They still worked for a supermarket, albeit a different company, and while my mom swapped seafood for pharmacy, it was otherwise the same. But as I got to know my new peers, discovering that, in the year 2007, they lived in houses without air conditioning or cable television or granite countertops, that their moms made shepherd’s pie with boxed mashed potatoes while I was making my dough from scratch for Ina’s seafood pot pie, I felt the stirrings of something ugly. And something luscious. I was better than them. Looking down on my peers from on high, quite literally, deliriously pubescent at six feet tall and 130 pounds, I got a taste of the upper crust and pretended not to notice that I was the one forcing it down my own throat. I didn’t know this then but, during the year and a half it took for our house back in New Jersey to finally sell, my parents were paying two mortgages. They were barely scraping by. How they kept our potential financial ruin to themselves, I don’t know. But maybe it wasn’t hard. Not when their child was keeping himself so very busy, making food for the family and the home and the life of his dreams, plating the meal as pretty as he knew how, and whispering to himself, “How easy was that?”
I don’t like to cook anymore. I’m not too sure I ever actually enjoyed it, not that pleasure has necessarily been the guiding force of my life. Quite to the ascetic contrary. And I’m not exactly yearning for affiliation with the upper-crust anymore either. Or so my politics dictate. But while I may not like it, I still have to do it. It’s mostly soups that I cook for myself these days, preparing a big pot of a bean stew that’ll last me for the week. Affordable fuel. Or as the CEOs would say: content. I’m hardly alone in eating the same thing everyday, if anything that’s perhaps what bonds me most to my generation, this swath of stalled adults whose only taste for fish comes out of a tin. I can’t afford red snapper at $40 a pound any time soon. But I’ll tell you who can. Watching all these old episodes of Barefoot Contessa, I felt myself returning to someplace cozy and familiar. Like how they say most people go all their lives only ever listening to the music they loved as teenagers. Just a bunch of thumb suckers. Not that I’m judging. Our modern life is grim—but it’s always bright in Ina’s kitchen. Where the East Hampton sunshine warms the cedar shake, and burns golden on her hedgerows of thyme, playing tricks in the steam still rising off a hasselback kielbasa, fetched mere moments ago from her Viking range. Life could be so beautiful. It could be cocktails and cashmere, in clever company, hydrangea leaves for garnish and pavlova in the garden with beach sand to weigh down the balloons. And she’s written us the recipes. And if I try for them and they don’t come out—oh well. I’ll just keep watching.