Ina Garten, seventy-six, is one of the most beloved and successful figures in American culinary history. It all began in 1978, when she left her role writing nuclear-energy budgets at the White House to purchase Barefoot Contessa, a specialty food store in Westhampton, New York.
Tolstoy was a moralist. He wrote one novel—Anna Karenina—in which infidelity ends in death, and another—War and Peace—in which his characters endure a thousand pages of political, military and romantic turmoil so as to eventually earn the reward of domestic marital bliss. In the epilogue to War and Peace we encounter his protagonist Natasha, unrecognizably transformed.