Ina: A Garten-variety food empire, built book by book

Ina Garten's cookbooks do press runs of, like, ten million copies. Her approach is unique, this Eater article- collected by Longreads- explains, in that she manages her Ina-ness personally: all the social media, all the food-porn photos, all the words and the TV shows and the appearances.

But other things require a sharper eye:

There was one component of Ina's brand mélange that was adopted but then discarded: ideas of mothering and motherhood. "Very quickly I realized that coming into a food store was really like coming home to mom," she told Martha [Stewart] in that video. "You wanted to be made to feel really comfortable, you wanted to be welcomed." The idea crops up as well in the preface to the first cookbook, in an explanation of Barefoot Contessa-ism: "It’s about Mom." But even already there is a caveat: "It's more of an emotional picture of a mother who was always there," Ina writes. And when a friend was working too hard, she writes, she had him over and made him ice cream and cookies: "Isn't that what we wanted our mothers to do?" We did want that, and we did not get it. 

After the first book, "mother" is mostly stricken from Ina’s rotation of motifs. Mom is too fraught. Instead, Ina is a stalwart defender of being welcoming. She believes a house should smell good. "When somebody comes home and everything's there and the kitchen smells like sugar apple pie," Ina said to me, "you know, it's nice. It's really nice, and the pillows are fluffed, and I love it." 

After the first book, whenever motherhood is introduced, it's not warmly. While making fresh lemonade in one episode of the show, Ina says that this is "not that stuff your mother used to bring home from the grocery store." This is the opposite of how historically we speak of both mothers and of the lemonade of yore. Food in Ina's childhood home was largely a practical event. "She wasn't the warmest, funniest person around," Ina said of her mother. Ina has nothing, she has said, in her house from her childhood. Of her marriage day, she has said, "That's when my life began." Never, to my knowledge, in the cookbooks or shows, is there even a hint of an idea of a pet or a child in their home. Ina and Jeffrey are two against the world.