Despite her multimillion dollar fortune and celebrity pals, Ina Garten is a true balabusta

Be Ready When the Luck HappensBy Ina GartenPenguin Random House, 320 pages, $34

When I told a friend I was writing about Ina Garten’s new memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, she exclaimed, “Oh, I love her! She’s a real balabusta!”

Wait a minute —  my Polish immigrant grandma is who I think of when I hear that term.

It means, in most translations from the Yiddish, a superior homemaker, whose abode is her dominion, and her mission is to serve those who enter it. And I mean literally serve.

That was my paternal bubbe Paulina. Upon entering her Detroit house, she greeted you with, “A glass tea?” Then she’d hotfoot her 4’10″-inch self into her big kosher kitchen with its pale-yellow cabinets stretching up to the ceiling, and quickly return with a glass of Swee-Touch-Nee tea (and sugar cubes).

When we came for Shabbat or Pesach dinner, Paulina rarely ate with us. Her three adult sons, including my dad, would call out, “Ma! Ma! Come out to the table!” And she would ignore them, preferring to give the soup an extra stir, the brisket another basting. Try and enter her kitchen and offer help, she’d shoo you away.

By today’s standards, Paulina was hardly liberated. Her husband made the money, davened in shul, played poker with his buddies. But within the confines of her traditional role, she was a classic balabusta.

I have watched Ina Garten (known to her legions of fans as The Barefoot Contessa) on her Food Channel shows. And yes, I have noted in her series Be My Guest the pride she takes in whipping up highly caloric dishes for her (celebrity) friends and Jeffrey (her much adored husband for over 50 years) at the couple’s sprawling home in the Hamptons.

At age 76, she seems to have achieved the Female Chef Mogul Best Life — a highly prosperous, semi-glamorous media star life my bubbe could not have imagined living. (Nor can I.)

Garten, born Ina Rosenberg in Brooklyn, is an entrepreneur de cuisine, and a hugely successful one in the gracious living business. In Be Ready When the Luck Happens, she shares how her career began with the purchase of The Barefoot Contessa (one of many profitable impulses), a gourmet deli in Long Island’s Westhampton. And how, through many years of toil and persistence, and plenty of you-should-be-so lucky contacts and good fortune, she grew her business into, well, a domestic goddess empire.

To be clear, in her early 80s Martha Stewart still milks her celebrity in a myriad of ways Garten hasn’t. Stewart’s “brand” is stamped on 100 cookbooks, on bedding, towels, cookware, athletic shoes, even CBD “wellness gummies.” She often appears on TV (including as co-host of a cooking show with rapper Snoop Dogg). And there’s a new Netflix documentary about her.

But since the first of her own baker’s dozen cookbooks sold like hotcakes, and the first episodes of The Barefoot Contessa cooking series aired on the Food Channel in 2001, Garten has also been a fan favorite — though less imperious, cozier, more inviting than Martha, and as she puts it, “accessible.”

“One thing I learned,” she notes, “and continue to learn every day, is that the food we enjoy connects to our deepest memories of when we felt happy, comfortable, nurtured.”

“I wanted to recreate those nostalgic sensations, with fresher ingredients, and make them even better than remembered,” she adds.

It’s a winning recipe. Parade Magazine has estimated the Gartens’ combined wealth at $160 million — less than half of Stewart’s net worth, but nothing to shake a spoon at.

OK, I admit my view of her is fogged by a big dollop of eat-the-rich resentment and a soupcon of envy. So much wealth, perfection and privilege! (Did I mention her splendid getaway flat in Paris?)

So, wouldn’t her memoir be another celebration of a posh domesticity fueled more by money and hustle, than what my bubbe might call gemütlich?

Well, it is that. And in some ways, it’s more — particularly the recounting of her life before she became a phenom.

Yes, yes, there’s a lot of name-dropping of celebrity pals who love dropping by for a nosh (e.g. actress Emily Blunt, author John Grisham, filmmaker Mel Brooks) And did I mention she’s also chummy with Taylor Swift?

Surely, she exaggerates how she couldn’t really afford to buy this abode, or renovate that Paris apartment, or expand her business into a multi-media enterprise. (It must be a little easier when your husband has worked for a major investment bank.)

Yet despite my aversion to advice from the rich and famous on how we can all get that way, I began to find in in the book’s chatty, often humorous, at times self-deprecating pages why Garten is so beloved by the public. And it isn’t just her evangelism for comfort food like her cholesterol-spiking devil’s food cake.

Garten is relatable because, in part, she doesn’t take her success for granted. And she’s candid about a difficult upbringing she has no nostalgia for. Her mother was cold, rigid, and fed her own children what any gourmand would call a spartan diet. Her father was a prosperous surgeon who was given to angry, at times violent outbursts at home, in one instance pulling his daughter by the hair for some infraction.

According to Garten, her parents demeaned and discouraged her, even when she excelled at school and displayed other talents. “We had all the accoutrements of a comfortable life,” she notes, “but for me, it was a dour existence.” A lingering sense of inadequacy sent her years later into therapy.

But young Garten also had a bubbe: her loving, encouraging paternal grandma Bessie who “like all good cooks,” she writes, “was happiest when she was feeding people.”

Though there is little mention of Judaism in the book, Garten embraces her Jewish heritage and especially its comfort foods. (A photo of a steaming cauldron of goldena yoich graces one of her Instagram posts, with the caption, “Is there anything more Jewish than making a big pot of chicken soup?”)

Garten also recounts, in detail, meeting at age 15 the attentive college student Jeffrey Garten, who soon became her rock and refuge — not just the love of her life, but her biggest booster, best travel companion, and (when need be) financial guru.

After a post-college federal government job that bored her stiff, she leaped at the chance to buy The Barefoot Contessa. And she eventually expanded and relocated that gourmet emporium to tony East Hampton, a summer “playground for the rich” and even better market for her delectable chocolate chip cookies, fresh baguettes and carry-out roast chickens.

Garten recounts hard work and humorous mini-disasters at her stores, a few setbacks, and a brief, painful marital separation. Jeffrey was a man of his era, expecting his spouse to be a balabusta at home while she worked almost round the clock at her career. But Garten was a woman of her time as well, a budding feminist who wanted an equal partnership at home.

They agreed to “take a break.” While he was in Tokyo on a work assignment, she toiled her tush off, living alone for the first time with a hellish work schedule, and a heavy commute from her dreary digs in Manhattan.

(Spoiler alert: she and Jeffrey worked it out, and both adorn the cover of Cooking for Jeffrey, a book of recipes for her husband’s favorite dishes.)

In the media blitz for Luck Is Where You Find It, the news that this idealized couple wasn’t always in perfect harmony probably made her even more relatable to fans. And it is hard to imagine Martha Stewart baring her insecurities, making so many jokes at her own expense, and sharing credit for her success with teenagers who worked summers at her stores, produce suppliers, assistants, TV colleagues and (we should be so lucky) her architect.

Garten also offers friendly advice to budding entrepreneurs that doesn’t seem far-fetched or generic. And her unapologetic stance for not having children is refreshing in a culture that still expects women to procreate, no matter what.

In print, and on screen, Garten exudes the ease and care of a good teacher. And her chatting-with-neighbor style, and delight in sharing her own pleasures with you, are disarming traits.

So, despite my ambivalence about celebrity culture, I admit that maybe Ina Garten really is a self-made 21st Century neo-balabusta in a society that, let’s face it, worships the high life few of us will attain. But some ambitious women do achieve it. And in a different era than her own, my bubbe Paulina might have been a Garten fan.

Or she might have spun off her own kosher cooking show and food empire. Yes, Paulina’s chicken soup was that good.