Get the recipe: Stewed chicken thighs with kumquats and spices with honey
The actress and culinary talent's third cookbook, Indulge (released this month by Harvest), is a rejection of the restrictions that ruled her life. The book's title is both her invitation and a repurposing of a word that some naive people would have you believe is a dirty word.
“Why can't we enjoy every day of life's hectic pace?” Bertinelli said. (She has a charming penchant for alternating between dropping f-bombs and their airwave-friendly alternatives.) “We only have this one.”
The recipes in this book are relentlessly fun. There's a vegetable galette with a picturesque rainbow of produce, and a white chocolate chip cookie bursting with lemon and lime. She picks kumquats from the bushes in her backyard and simmers them on the stove with chicken. There, the bitter flesh of the fruit succumbs to the heat and becomes mellow, softening the sweetness of the skin.
“Indulge” comes after a tumultuous time for Bertinelli, who went from sitcom star to Food Network mainstay and hosted shows like “Kids Baking Championship” and “Valerie’s Home Cooking” for a total of eight years. . by loss or absence. Her first husband, musician Eddie Van Halen, passed away in 2020. Her bitter divorce from her second husband, businessman Tom Vitale, was finalized in 2022. The essays that connect these recipes are meditations on healing and forgiveness. The book, which grew out of this trying period, was her way of working through and ultimately silencing “the same things that had been going around in my head all her life,” she said. Told.
Bertinelli grew up in a multinational family, thanks to his auto executive father working for General Motors (“I call myself the GM kid,'' he says jokingly). He started acting at the age of 12 and learned the heartbreaking experience of rejection early on. “I think she did 99 to 100 interviews by the time we got her first commercial,” she said. “It can confuse a child's head.”
Her big break came in 1975, when showrunner Norman Lear decided to reshoot the pilot for the sitcom that later became One Day at a Time (1975-1984). Bertinelli's Barbara Cooper played the precocious, picture-perfect role of the youngest of two daughters of a divorced single mother, displaying a rapier wit in her quick one-liners.
Bertinelli grew older before America's eyes during the show's nine seasons, winning two Golden Globe Awards for the performance that made her famous. “One Day at a Time” is “my college, that's what I call it,” Bertinelli said. “Because I was in a university where I learned how to interact with adults. It was a university where I learned how to make crafts, which is what I wanted to learn.”
Fame also brought Bertinelli into the orbit of her rock star first husband. They married in 1981 when she was only 20 years old. Bertinelli's Indonesian mother-in-law, whom she still calls “Mrs. Van Halen,” introduced her to the wealthy man. The splendor of salads like gado gado and fluffy banana fritters known as pisang goreng was a far cry from the pork chops and strawberry rhubarb pie Bertinelli's Anglo-Irish mother weaned her on. “It's all things I've never heard of,” she said. “And it's unbelievably delicious without being overturned.” (Indulge features sambal, a popular Indonesian condiment.)
Even though cooking is a prominent part of Bertinelli's life, even she doesn't understand what prompted her to turn to cooking after many years as an actor. “Who knows?” she said with a laugh. Her first cookbook, her 2012 One Dish at a Time, was born out of her desire to share culinary knowledge influenced by her Italian grandmother and other women in her family. I did.
But it wasn't until 2015 that her food show career really took off. Her TV Land sitcom “Hot in Cleveland,” in which she starred, ended her five-year run unceremoniously. (By the way, she still doesn't understand the decision. “I don't understand why they canceled it when they made Betty White the star of the show,” she said.) (But I have no regrets.”) That same year, I received an offer to host “Kids Baking Championship” on Food Network.
Thus began Bertinelli's second chapter as a TV chef. It's a path she never intended to take, but to her fans, the leap seemed obvious.
Kathleen Collins, author of 2009's “Watching What We Eat,” a history of American food TV, said in an email that it was “heartwarming” to see Bertinelli on food TV. Collins grew up watching Bertinelli in her One Day at a Time and became obsessed with her, admiring and empathizing with the misunderstood children he saw on screen. Collins watched Bertinelli on the Food Network and felt as if Barbara Cooper had grown up and was still showing the way for women of her generation. “Her youthful energy is as strong as ever, which is a given for a foodie show,” Collins said.
Get the recipe: Stewed chicken thighs with kumquats and spices with honey
While cooking TV has long been dominated by megawatt personalities (see: Julia Child, Martin Yang, Graham Carr), the turn of the millennium marked an even bigger shift towards character-driven cooking shows, with Bertinelli It clearly fits the genre, Collins noted. . When Collins interviewed food network executives for “Watching What We Eat,” she found that they valued affability above all else. “Valerie is warm, charming, down-to-earth and relatable, which is exactly what executives and viewers are looking for,” Collins said.
But despite her high-profile job on the Food Network, Bertinelli found her relationship with food strained over the years due to stressors in her personal life. Her self-image began to crumble. When people made derogatory comments about her weight, she found herself agreeing with them.
She began to notice that she was using food to gauze deeper, harder-to-reach pains, as if playing an emotional game of whack-a-mole. “And if you push it away, shove it away, or eat it away, those feelings aren't going anywhere,” she said at the time. “It'll come back again.'' She rarely cooked, relying on pre-made meals like frozen pizza and sushi from the supermarket.
Then she realized she had had enough and regained consciousness.
“It's not the food that's bad for us,” she said of the epiphany. “It's how or why we eat it. If we're eating unconsciously, if we're eating to calm our emotions.”
Indulge, which embraces maximalism and comfort, is part of the food publishing industry's recent backlash against strict self-discipline and abstinence.
“Yes, the pressure to ‘just get on Ozempik’ (as if it were economically, logistically or physically easier) definitely increases the risk, but this culture that semi-rejects the norms of dietary culture “I see this moment as long overdue,” Emma Spector, author of “More, Please,” a book on bulimia to be published by Harper in July, said in an email. .
Ms. Spector is frustrated by what she calls “fake progressive diet and 'wellness' brands” that are telling consumers off. The U.S. weight loss industry has also grown to nearly $90 billion by 2023, and analysts expect that number to increase further this year. “We have a right to be better as a society, and I'm glad it's becoming less controversial,” Spector said.
It took Spector time to understand that her relationship with food was, in her words, “fueled by pleasure, not shame.” She said, “I love the idea that Valerie's cookbook helps others get started with self-work.”
Bertinelli herself admits that process is underway. Last year, the expiration of her contract brought an end to her activities on the Food Network, much to the chagrin of her legions of followers on social media, but she herself remains unfazed. (“Business is business,” she said diplomatically.) Now, she dreams of one day merging her two careers into one. Perhaps she'll play a cookbook author or chef in a sitcom. Bertinelli knows she's lucky. It is a rare experience for her to appear in two of the popular sitcoms. Most actresses can't even appear.
“But I'll never stop cooking,” she said.
Mayuk Sen won the James Beard Award fortaste maker” (2021), and the upcoming biography of actress Merle Oberon, “Love, Queenie” (2025).
