Listener supported, WNYC Studios.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Ina Garten is not just a household name, she's beloved. With the help of her Food Network program, the Barefoot Countessa, not to mention all those viral videos, Garten has 14 million cookbooks in print.

Her success doesn't come from pioneering recipes or being in the foodie avant-garde.

It's got more to do with a confiding, authentic warmth that tells you that you too can make cocavin

or a roast tenderloin or some roast carrots even.

Just follow the recipe.

You can do it.

Her approach to food is classic and above all accessible.

I've known her for a while, and I must tell you that the person you see on TV is the one you get in person.

Funny, unpretentious, a shrewd businesswoman, and a master of every chicken recipe known in the history of chicken. When she goes

on book tour, she doesn't come to a bookstore. She sells out the Kennedy Center. She's pretty

successful. A couple of years back, Ina Garten published a book called Go To Dinners, and I asked

her to join me on the program.

Now, I have to start out by telling you the last time I had a famous cook on the show,

I may have told you this, it was Jacques Papin.

And on the radio, with my laptop in the kitchen, I made crapes with him.

Wow.

Exactly, with my wife, Esther, laughing at me in the corner corner of the kitchen so we're not going to we're not going to cook we're just going to talk we're not cooking

we'll cook in person how's that exactly i'd love to do that nothing worse than having your wife

laughing at you it's a daily very very smart wife laughing at you now an hourly a daily... Your very, very smart wife laughing at you. It's an hourly occurrence.

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