47 pages • 1 hour read
Ina GartenBe Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 16-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary: “Put My Jugs on the What?”
In early 2002, one of Garten’s friends shows her an episode of the cooking show Nigella Bites, hosted by British chef Nigella Lawson. Garten is intrigued by Lawson’s casual on-screen demeanor, but again declines to film her own show. After a conversation with Rachel Purnell at Pacific Productions in London, Garten finally agrees to a show on her terms. The show is centered around real-life meals Garten has prepared for Jeffrey’s weekends at home, dinner parties with her friends, and picnics on the beach. The crew also accompanies Garten to grocery stores and markets to help viewers understand how she shops. Although the production is difficult, often involving 14-hour days, Garden eventually discovers a talent for being on screen. Her producer suggests that her nerves are interpreted as authentic excitement.
Meanwhile, Garten continues to supervise construction on the Paris apartment. When an upstairs neighbor accidentally floods a bathroom, causing damage to the apartment’s ceiling, Garten offers to buy out her neighbor and is able to expand the apartment. After two years of construction, Garten finally allows Jeffrey to enter their fully furnished, decorated apartment. She fills the apartment with fresh flowers, bakes croissants, and plays French jazz as he enters. He immediately loves the space, and both later identify that day as the happiest of their lives.
The couple spend New Year’s Eve in the apartment with friends, and Garten prepares a simple but elegant dinner. Her butcher suggests roasting pork loin, specifying that she should begin the roast in a cold oven, and offers his phone number in case she needs help. She is touched by the suggestion and impressed by the results. When she returns to America, however, she learns the lower fat content in American pork causes different results.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Cooking with Elmo”
As the Paris apartment is completed, another construction project appears. Garten and Jeffrey are sick of being confined to the top floor of their house during the twice-yearly eight-week filming sessions required for Barefoot Contessa. She negotiates a deal to buy the property next to hers by presenting the owner—who had previously declined to sell for ten years—with three generous options. He accepts, and Garten works with architect Frank Greenwold to design a filming studio and workspace inspired by farm buildings in Belgium and upstate New York. The result is a warm, welcoming space that inspires Garten to produce the best food she can.
Garten explains that her food philosophy is guided by a belief in the importance of both flavor and texture. Focusing on these two aspects helps guide the development of her recipes and her presentation. Garten’s recipes contain no more than three prominent flavors; she pairs savory flavors with acidic flavors, and sweet flavors with bitter flavors. These combinations help to bring out the essence of each individual ingredient’s flavor. While testing recipes, Garten eats an entire serving to make sure the flavor is sustainable for a realistic meal. A similar philosophy applies to textures: homogenous foods like pureed soups bore Garten, so she pairs smooth purees with creamy cheese, crunchy croutons, and fatty bacon to add textural variety.
Although Garten’s intention for the show is for her guests to be real-life friends, famous faces begin to appear as the show progresses. Garten films with the comedian Mel Brooks, the Muppet Elmo, and the cast of the 2018 film Mary Poppins Returns. In each instance, the celebrity appears as a guest of one of Garten’s real-life friends. When the actress Jennifer Garner writes asking to film with Garten, Garten’s assistant initially rejects the request. However, Garten is intrigued by Garner’s passion for food and agrees to film, and the two become fast friends.
Chapter 18 Summary: “La Vie En Rose”
Garten and Jeffrey fall into a new rhythm: When she is not writing or filming and he is not writing or teaching, the couple travel to Paris. They opt not to have a television in the home, choosing to spend their time out in the city. In Paris, the couple establishes a routine of having coffee and breakfast in the same café each morning before wandering the city in the afternoon. Because their lives in the United States are so busy, they avoid making plans in Paris. The only plans they make are plans to eat meals with friends. Garten is impressed by the creativity of Parisian women hosting in small spaces often hundreds of years old. She also hosts visitors such as the American writer Nora Ephron, who visits six months before she dies of leukemia.
Garten attempts to expand the Barefoot Contessa brand through select partnerships. She partners with Stonewall Kitchens to produce baking kits for thirty-five of her recipes. The partnership lasts five years until Garten is faced with a choice to drastically raise prices or lower quality. She chooses to end the partnership. She later partners with a company called Contessa Premium Foods to produce frozen meals; when the partnership ends, the company continues to use her likeness, and Garten is forced to sue.
The process of building the Barefoot Contessa brand teaches Garten to stay true to her vision and to follow her instincts no matter what others think. Her dedication to quality and insistence on ending partnerships that don’t meet her quality standards help to maintain the integrity of the brand. Finally, she attributes her success to her willingness to let the universe point her in the right direction.
Chapter 19 Summary: “It’s Always Cocktail Hour in a Crisis”
In 2014, Food Network Magazine approaches Garten about a photoshoot with the musician Taylor Swift, who has named Garten as her favorite chef. Rather than staging a shoot, Garten suggests that they cook together. The next year, Garten takes her creative team to see Swift’s concert at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, and Swift invites them to an afterparty. At the after party, Garten and her team play drinking games with the US Women’s National Soccer Team, fresh from their 2015 World Cup win.
Over the next three years, Garten produces more television shows and writes more books while Jeffrey settles into a role as Dean of the Yale School of Management. In January 2020, Jeffrey correctly predicts that the newly-identified COVID-19 virus would shut the world down, and Garten encourages her team to stock up and prepare for a quarantine. Garten grows increasingly anxious in the first months of the 2020 quarantine, and a member of her team suggests that she turn to social media to connect with fans. Garten posts a picture of her pantry and offers to suggest meals to followers if they tell her what they have in stock. Nearly 9000 people respond, and Garten begins to post recipes using common pantry ingredients. On April Fools’ Day, she posts a humorous video of her mixing a giant cocktail with an entire bottle of vodka.
Meanwhile, she learns to shoot her show independently with two iPhones, and she promotes her book Modern Comfort Food via a virtual book tour. These changes in schedule allow Garten to begin to research and write her memoir. As she researches, she realizes that Jeffrey’s unconditional love has allowed her to move past the abuse of her childhood to live a successful life.
Epilogue Summary
During an interview with 60 Minutes, Garten is shocked when host Sharyn Alfonsi attributes her career success to hard work and a refusal to leave the details to chance. Garten initially rejects this praise, having always considered herself a lucky person whose career was a matter of chance. She recalls an earlier occasion when she referred to luck while receiving an award for women in media. After her speech, television personalities Oprah Winfrey and Lesley Stahl chastise her for downplaying her achievements. Garten realizes that her success is not the result of luck, but of the hard work she puts into being prepared when opportunities arise. She encourages readers to be ready when their luck happens.
Chapter 16-Epilogue Analysis
The final chapters of Be Ready When the Luck Happens underscore the memoir’s thematic interest in The Value of Unconditional Love and Support by suggesting that Garten’s relationship with her husband Jeffrey was essential to her success. As she begins the process of researching and writing her memoir, Garten is forced to confront the reality of the abuse she faced as a child. She describes her childhood home as “a house of horrors” (294), and writes that, when visiting the house for research, “the memories of feeling lonely and unloved were […] intense and disturbing” (294). The extreme nature of these descriptions reflects the long-lasting effects of the abuse on Garten’s sense of self. However, Garten argues that her relationship with Jeffrey—built on the unconditional love and support they offer each other—helped to heal the wounds of her childhood. She writes that “everything changed when I met Jeffrey” (299), and that the day she met him was “the day my life began” (299). She argues that “we all need only one person to believe in us” (299) in order to succeed, and that “for me, that person is Jeffrey” (299). These passages present Jeffrey as a central figure in her life and suggest, somewhat ironically, that his strong presence was responsible for rehabilitating her sense of self. Although she acknowledges her own hard work, Garten ultimately concludes that Jeffrey’s unconditional love and support allowed her to find the “happiness and peace” (299) necessary to “believe in myself” (299) and build a successful career.
The success of Garten’s career is demonstrated by repeated references to celebrities in this section of the memoir. In the early sections of the memoir, Garten is delighted when celebrities shop at the Barefoot Contessa, taking it as a sign of the success of the store. In this section, however, Garten interacts directly with celebrities like the actresses Jennifer Garner (261) and Emily Blunt (262), the writer Nora Ephron (268), the musician Taylor Swift (283), and the Olympic athlete Abby Wambach (285), who are fans-turned-friends. Garten’s interactions with these celebrities in the memoir demonstrates how far she has come over the course of her career, from serving celebrities at a small shop to claiming them as fans.
This section of Be Ready When the Luck Happens contains some of the only food advice in the memoir. Although this advice reflects the food philosophy evident in her recipes, it also echoes her personal advice for relationships. She suggests that the secret to good food is also the secret to happy living: “savory things tend to need something acidic, and sweet things tend to need something bitter to give them more depth of flavor” (255). In cooking, these types of pairings “make the intrinsic ingredients taste like the best versions of themselves” (254). While this statement functions as straightforward cooking advice, it is also a metaphorical description of the balance between opposites that makes relationships work. This maxim reflects her earlier suggestion that, over the course of their relationship, she and Jeffrey “found […] balance” (142) by emphasizing their differences: “Jeffrey became lighter, while I became more serious without losing my sense of fun” (141). In both instances, pairing seemingly distinct individuals brings out the best of both. The fact that Garten’s food advice echoes her advice for personal relationships underscores The Emotional Significance of Food in her worldview.
The memoir begins and ends with references to storytelling, suggesting that storytelling is an important framework for how she sees the world. In both instances, these nods to storytelling act as a self-referential acknowledgement of the work that goes into writing a book. The prologue begins with a brief anecdote about her life with Jeffrey and ends with the phrase “I can’t wait to tell you my story” (2). The epilogue ends with Garten’s realization—having finished the process of writing the book—that, despite “the story I had told myself—and others” (302) about her life, “my story was about hard work and luck” (303). The repetition of the word story in these passages suggests that the storytelling framework—identifying anecdotes and sharing them with the purpose of educating others—is essential to Garten’s worldview. The fact that the memoir is bookended by these references to storytelling and narrative also serves to establish Garten’s entrance into literary culture with her first memoir.
