Barefoot Contessa

Barefoot Contessa is a program on Food Network hosted by Ina Garten. The show's name comes from the upscale specialty food store which has since closed.

The show is set in Ina Garten's mansion home in the East Hamptons. The show follows a similar format to other "lifestyle" cooking shows found on the Food Network, catering to people looking to easily entertain while enriching their palates with little expertise.

A typical episode would have Ina preparing a multi-course meal for friends, colleagues, small parties and, often, just for her husband Jeffrey, who works as a professor at Yale School of Management during the week, but returns home every Friday night. Her recipes often include fresh herbs, which she hand-harvests from her perfectly manicured estate garden.

Often, her recipes will require an excursion, where one can witness her driving in her BMW or Mercedes to various East Hampton specialty stores, like her own Barefoot Contessa. Sometimes she might ask Jeffrey or her guest to pickup various ingredients or gourmet desserts from one of the local shops.

The show is highly entertaining with much educational value. Ina focuses on deconstructing complex French recipes like Boeuf Bourguignon while disseminating the joys of luxury, and simply "treating yourself".

The show is mostly filmed in her own kitchen with fast moving camera shots and many close ups of perfectly-ripe fruits, eggs falling from the shells, or butter melting and sizzling in a stainless steel pan. Barefoot Contessa is a good example of the genre known as food porn, along with shows such as Nigella Bites or Iron Chef. These shows focus highly on rich, palate-pleasing foods with stunning visual presentation and rarely cater to the extremely health-conscious demographic.

A cookbook of the same name was also published in 1999 and is currently available along with a host of other books and merchandise.

External links

• Barefoot Contessa on The Food Network
• Recipes from The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook

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Barefoot Contessa is also the name of a band, a store, and a movie that came out in 1954 starring Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner.