Actress Emily Blunt has been credited with a definitive potato recipe by cooking legend Ina Garten, and she is tired of being roasted for it.
The Oscar nominee appeared on Hot Ones on Thursday, the chicken wing show that peppers celebrity guests with questions while they eat some of the world’s spiciest wings. Asked about her love for cooking shows, Blunt told host Sean Evans, “The Great British Bake Off is my favorite cooking show, bar none.”
“It makes me feel very nostalgic about England. I feel very happy when I watch it. I like the irreverence. I like the sense of humor. Love cake.”
Another show she loves, she added, is Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa.
“Yeah and you’ve been on that show,” Evans replied, “You even crashed her website with your family’s roasted potato recipe.”
That was when Blunt set the record straight. Garten included Blunt’s roast potato recipe in her 2020 cookbook, Modern Comfort Food, with the title, “Emily’s English Roasted Potatoes.”
Blunt said she has since been credited with “inventing” the simple recipe, which only consists of Kosher salt, vegetable oil, sea salt, parsley, and the potatoes themselves.
“I really have to clear up this rumor that I invented these roast potatoes,” Blunt said. “They have been named ‘Emily‘s Roast Potatoes.’ They really aren’t mine. This is like a classic English thing that everyone cooks every single Sunday,” she explained.
“But I don’t know if America has quite got on board with this tradition.” She first showed Garten how to make them during her 2018 appearance on Barefoot Contessa.
Garten was so impressed by the simple potatoes, she told Blunt in 2022, when the actress visited the TV chef again on her spinoff series Be My Guest, that she posted them on her popular Instagram account.
“And it like blew up,” Garten told Blunt at the time. “Everyone was like Emily’s roasted potatoes just broke the internet!”
Blunt said her own friends were unimpressed. “I think all of my British friends are like, ‘You didn’t invent roast potatoes,’” she said on Thursday. “And I’m like, ‘I know.’ But if Ina Garten wants to call them ‘Emily’s Roast Potatoes,’ I’m absolutely delighted.”
