Overview

The Barefoot Contessa’s new cookbook retains the same qualities of reliability, versatility, and simplicity consistent throughout the Barefoot Contessa series, but it has enough flaws (expense, a few obviously throwaway recipes and sections, over-the-top richness) and references earlier books in the series too much to be truly friendly to new readers of Ina Garten.

Full review

When I set out to buy the Barefoot Contessa: Back To Basics cookbook, I wasn’t at all anxious or worried about the quality of the product I was getting despite not having read many reviews about it or not owning a previous Barefoot Contessa title. After all, I quite enjoy her show, which is one of the last Food Network shows that involves actual cooking, and she does throw usually elegant television parties that are inspiring. Since it’s also one of the best-selling cookbooks in retailers’ lists, I was confident that I would get a passable product. As it turns out, passable is indeed what I got.

Structure of the book

The book has seven chapters for 90 recipes:
Cocktail hour (9 recipes)
Soup (8 recipes)
Lunch (11)
Dinner (21)
Vegetables (14)
Desserts (14)
Breakfast (13)
At the end there are very brief sections for FAQs, sources, and menus. Scattered among the recipes, there are spreads for lists of tips, such as “Set a Table Like a Pro” and “10 No-Cook Things to Serve for Dessert”. Almost all the recipes have beautifully styled full-page photographs; marginal notes regarding ingredients and helpful hints for cooking are found with some recipes.

How is this book interesting/special/new/useful?

In the introduction Garten repetitively expresses her objectives in writing the book: to show that simple recipes using seasonal ingredients and certain “flavor-unlockers” (be it lemon, wine, herbs, salt, or black pepper) bring out the best in dishes. Though she doesn’t explicitly state exactly what she’s done in each recipe to impart this unique touch, she does deliver and you will find mostly classic combinations of ingredients that complement each other well. There are even some more novel approaches that keep the book fresh and interesting, such as roasting the tomatoes for her Roasted Tomato Caprese Salad, which helps to enhance the flavor of tomatoes even when the product isn’t at its best. Other nice touches that don’t require much effort include roasting squash for a salad, or using truffle butter to flavor filet of beef sandwiches or pasta.

Since it’s the Barefoot Contessa, you can be sure that the recipes are tested extensively, and that’s exactly what has made the brand so popular. Though you might be alarmed to prepare Lobster Corn Chowder that has 6 tablespoons butter, 4 cups whole milk, and 2 cups heavy cream (and serves 6), these recipes are meant for special occasions and aren’t meant for daily consumption. I haven’t read any of her other books but from watching Garten’s show, the fat and dairy quotas met in this book seem up to par with her usual.

Also part of what makes the brand popular is that Garten gives you recipes that are easy and will easily become part of your entertaining repertoire. Unless you’re going to throw more than 21 dinner parties in a year, you most likely won’t have to repeat anything unless your own guests clamor for a reprise. The menu section at the end is a great way to skip all the guesswork in combining the book’s dishes.

What problems/flaws are there?

However, though the book seems to fancy itself free from any caloric boundaries, it still seems like the hand that enriches the dishes has been too heavy. While I have no doubt that a cup and a tablespoon of dairy per serving of chowder will taste magnificent, will cutting back on the magnificence really make a huge dent in the dish? What about contributing richness through the potatoes and corn in the dish? Another recipe, the Baked Blintzes with Fresh Blueberry Sauce, looks promising, but it has 2 pounds of cheese (3/4 ricotta and 1/4 mascarpone) in the filling baked in between two “blintz” layers. For a breakfast dish that serves 8, that is a half-cup of cheese per person, akin to having a giant slice of cheesecake for breakfast. While I do recognize the recipes are for special occasions, your guests will probably appreciate more moderation (and less making them feel ill).

The ingredient lists that appear throughout the book are balanced between a few longer ones (understandably the beef stew and pot roast) and short ones, but only a few have ingredients that require some searching (such as Herbes de Provence, fromage blanc, truffle butter, specific cheeses, and curiously named brands such as Pepperidge Farm Herb-seasoned Stuffing Mix). The truffle butter is surprisingly inexpensive ($4 for black and $7 for white), but the mere fact that you’ll require mail-order to make a dish is a deviation from her assertion in the introduction:

I don’t see any reason why we can’t buy perfectly good ingredients in a grocery store, cook them simply…

Also, one of her desserts (Honey Vanilla Fromage Blanc) uses 2 pounds of fromage blanc, available via mail for only $19.

The book itself is not that inexpensive at $35, but reading it I felt cheated. There is a recipe for Garlic Ciabatta Bread that can be written in a single footnote (not as though you’ll need to measure herbs for it). Meanwhile, I have never before read a cookbook that referenced its predecessors so heavily. Reading the FAQs, I saw this:

I love to make your filet of beef (from Barefoot Contessa Parties) but my oven smokes when I cook it. What should I do?

The introduction for French Bistro Steaks with Provencal butter says:

And if you insisted on serving it with a big pile of Matchstick Potatoes (Barefoot in Paris, page 153), I’m sure no one would object.

I was beginning to wonder if I was part of the target audience of this book. However, the worst offender is (from the Roasted Turkey Roulade):

If you want to serve this with gravy, you can find a delicious recipe on page 119 in Barefoot Contessa Family Style.

That’s already three books referenced. If I were a housewife wishing to entertain for the first time, I would appreciate even a little bit of page space allotted for gravy, instead of a “recipe” for garlic bread (or a page for its photograph!). And it is not at all tasteful to suggest that a new reader should search for your older books just to enhance a recipe.

The tone of the book is classic Ina Garten (down-to-earth, approachable) but can get silly in places (the use of “OMG” comes to mind). I have to question what kind of attitude to cooking is being fostered when one of the notes says “a plastic bag might not be elegant but it ensures that the meat is fully surrounded by the flavorful marinade.” It’s functional, simple, inexpensive, and not seen by the guests, so no one cares– wouldn’t that make it elegant? She has a recipe for “Easy” Sole Meuniere– which is just Sole Meuniere.

Finally, some recipes and tips leave something to be desired. One recipe for “Easy Sticky Buns” involves rolling sticky bun filling (sugar, butter, cinnamon, nuts) in store-bought puff pastry to avoid the labor of a two-day yeast dough. All that would accomplish is to make one long for actual sticky buns. Though she tries to focus on getting recipes done in advance for effortless entertaining, she has two delicious recipes for risotto without sharing the secrets of parcooking risotto for quick service. She uses a stand mixer extensively, but says in the FAQs that a hand mixer is a stand mixer you have to hold and can always be subbed in. I shudder to think of the first-time baker trying to mix the dough for her White Pizzas with Arugula using a hand mixer. The “tip pages”, such as “Top 10 Flavor Boosters”, reek of last-minute page-filling: why ten? Why not fifteen? The tips for that topic include marinating foods to be grilled, but not a few important ones like freshly grinding spices and grating cheese, and checking expiration dates.

In conclusion, for a very popular cookbook, I had a feeling a little more time and care could have been taken in writing it, and whether a first-time reader like me was even invited to the “party”. It makes me curious as to how much better-written her earlier cookbooks are, when the brand hadn’t yet turned into the phenomenon that it is today.