By Charlotte Druckman
The down-to-earth wisdom that Barbara "Babs" Costello shares with her millions of social media followers comes from lessons handed down by her Italian grandparents and from her own experience as matriarch of a growing clan that now numbers 18. She still pulls her recipes out of the box she's kept them in for 55 years.
The youngest of Costello's four daughters, Liz Ariola, was responsible for nudging the 76-year-old grandmother onto TikTok, and she continues to manage @brunchwithbabs and the unexpected career it has birthed. So far, Costello's social-media accounts have garnered some eight million followers.
"I call them my online family," she said, from her home in Ridgefield, Conn. "I've met a lot of them now, going to the grocery or a farmer's market. All of a sudden: 'Babs, is that you?!' "
The former educator has secured two cookbook deals -- "Celebrate With Babs" $(DK)$, published in 2022, and "Every Day With Babs" (Clarkson Potter), arriving in the spring -- plus a partnership with home furnishings company Birch Lane and an ambassadorship with QVC.
You'd think the pending holidays might be too much to take on in addition to the rest, but Costello isn't going to break a sweat. It's business as usual, starting with Thanksgiving.
All in the Family
Costello's father's family emigrated to the U.S. from Lebanon, and her mother's, from Italy. Growing up in Chicago, she had an especially close relationship to the latter. "It was an arranged marriage. They were married something like 65 years, had nine children and 22 grandchildren -- it sounds a little like a thousand years ago," she said, laughing. "My grandfather was a bricklayer, and he bought an apartment building, and it was filled with family." Costello recalled her grandmother's "fabulous dinners," her grandfather pouring the wine and the Italian songs they would sing as they washed dishes.
She married her high school sweetheart, Bill Costello (aka Mr. Babs), and in the early 1970s, after he served in the National Guard, the couple stayed on in Chicago, where he worked for Bristol-Myers Squibb. She started teaching there and continued when he was transferred to Virginia and then to Connecticut, where she founded a preschool. After running it for 23 years, her plan was to slow down. "You know what you do, you go out for lunch, you take water aerobics, the things that retired grandmas do," she said. After Covid hit, she was helping her kids with their kids when, one fateful day, her daughter said she should be on TikTok.
"I was like, 'Well, my granddaughters are dancing on TikTok. I love to dance, but I'm not dancing on TikTok,' " Costello said. Once she realized her daughter was serious, and that there would be no dancing required, she agreed to do a single video, cooking her grandmother's chicken oreganata. "I barely spoke, because I didn't know how it all worked," she said. "I thought it was one and done." The comments told her otherwise. Viewers said Costello was a comfort, that she reminded them of their own mothers and grandmothers, sorely missed during lockdown.
Costello realized that social media, with which she'd previously had zero interaction, could be "powerful for the good." She continued making her nonna's recipes on camera and soon began dispensing practical advice, too, a kind of grandma-style home ec.
Home for All Holidays
Her first cookbook runs through an entire year's worth of Costello family festivities, including Oktoberfest and the Super Bowl. Planning is key. She gets the shopping done early in the week leading up to the occasion.
Costello also recommends having a full day reserved for preparation that is not the day of the holiday itself; she even preps for the prep, pulling out baking sheets, pots, mixing bowls and casserole dishes in advance, determining the correct order in which to power through producing numerous dishes at once. "Measure everything, even if it's a quarter teaspoon of salt, before you start combining and cooking, because then it's so easy," she said. "It's just, like, mix and fold and bake."
She considers every aspect of game day itself, devising ways to keep guests out of the kitchen so they can't distract her. "It's nice to set up a beverage station away from the kitchen so that people can come in, relax, get a drink, and then if you have appetizers that don't need to be served warm, you can spread those around the home so people are gathering and moving and not necessarily all congregated in the kitchen, " she advised.
For Christmas Eve, when she puts her own, casual spin on the Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes, guests find warm crab dip and crackers awaiting them and eat bowls of scallop chowder on the couch, by the fire. New Year's Day chez Mr. & Mrs. Babs features a DIY Bloody Mary bar with an array of garnishes (shrimp and bacon among them).
In true Babs style, both feasts can be prepped in advance. So can her Thanksgiving spinach and cheese bake, a recipe she got as a newlywed, from her friend Sue. The more to-do-list items she can knock out in advance, the sooner she can emerge from the kitchen and spend memorable time with friends and family -- you know, what the holidays are supposed to be all about.
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 07, 2024 11:19 ET (16:19 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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