Martha Stewart has revealed how her former friendship with Ina Garten ended badly, when the culinary titans initially met during a lemon emergency.
Stewart told The New Yorker that Garten, whom she mentored and helped become a star, treated her with indifference after Stewart was jailed for insider trading in 2004.
“When I was sent to Alderson prison, she stopped talking to me,” Stewart said, adding that the scandal marked “the end of their friendship.”
“I found it very distressing and extremely hostile,” Stewart said, although she maintains she is “not bitter at all” about the incident some 20 years ago.
Garten firmly refuses to give Steward the silent treatment.
Stewart, now 83, was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction and two counts of lying to federal investigators and was sent to the Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia to serve a five-month sentence.
The friendship between chef Ina Garten and Martha Stewart never recovered after the TV star was sent to prison in 2004 in connection with an insider trading scandal. The pair are pictured in 1999
In the early days of their friendship, Stewart helped Garten’s career by featuring her on an episode of her show Martha Stewart Living in 1999.
She introduced Garten to an editor who worked with her on her first cookbook, The Barefoot Contessa, named after Garten’s former food store in East Hampton.
This was followed by a television show, also called The Barefoot Contessa, on which Garten is now as famous as her former mentor.
Stewart was ordered to serve five months of house arrest and two years of supervised probation and was fined $30,000.
Martha Stewart always maintained her innocence and managed to salvage her reputation, but her friendship with Garten, 76, never recovered. Stewart is pictured outside the courthouse in July 2004.
Stewart has always maintained his innocence and managed to salvage his reputation, but his friendship with Garten, 76, never recovered.
The two domestic goddesses met in the early 1990s while Stewart was driving through the picturesque Long Island town of East Hampton.
She was passing by Garten’s now-closed Barefoot Contessa store when she got a craving for lemon squares in what she described as a “lemon square emergency.”
Garten recalls the first time they met, recalling the encounter in a 2017 interview.
Stewart met Garten in the early 1990s while driving through the picturesque Long Island town of East Hampton and walked into Garten’s bakery.
Garten firmly refuses to give Steward the silent treatment
In the early days of their friendship, Stewart, left, helped Garten’s career by featuring her on an episode of her show Martha Stewart Living in 1999, introducing her to an editor who worked with her on her first cookbook, The Barefoot Contessa.
“My desk was right in front of the cheese case and we ended up talking. We ended up doing a charity gala at his house together and I did the catering, and we became friends after that,” Garten said. Time.
“I think she did something really important, which was take something that was undervalued, which is the homegrown arts, and elevated it to a level where people were proud to do it and that completely changed the landscape,” he said in an article profiling Garten.
‘Then I went my own way, which is that I’m not a trained professional chef, cooking is really hard for me; here I am, after 40 years in the food business, it’s still hard for me.’
“It took me a while, but I finally understood what motivated Ina and realized that here was a true kindred spirit with very similar but unique talents,” Stewart wrote in the foreword to her book.