She makes a mean sauce — and fights off muggers and jealous boyfriends, too.
Before she was famous, Rachael Ray was mugged — twice — by a teenage boy outside her Woodside, Queens, apartment.
“He has literally a Glock in his hand and sticks it in my back, and I scream so loud. I think they heard it in Jersey … I freaked the flip out, and I think I scared him more than he scared me,” she dished to The Post after the premiere of her new A&E show, “Rachael Ray’s Meals in Minutes.”
“I sprayed him in the face with Mace and he was not happy. I still feel really bad about it actually. I don’t think that child would have hurt me.”
At the time, Ray, now 55, was working at Agata and Valentina, an Italian gourmet market on the Upper East Side.
The night she was mugged, she left work around 11 p.m., and then headed to her roach-infested Queens walk-up.
“There were roaches in my apartment, but I stayed because I was so worried about the dog that lived there,” she said.
Ray was worried about the super’s dog, Liza, who was kept chained in the laundry room.
She often brought food to the pup, who may have saved her life when the mugger returned a few days later.
“The kid came back to mug me a second time because he was pissed,” Ray explained via Zoom from her apartment in the East Village.
“He pushed me down this little alleyway, and Liza runs down the hall at him and she scared him away. He was petrified of the dog.”
Ray also had to duke it out with her jealous Brazilian boyfriend around this time.
“He was very sweet, very kind, very funny, gorgeous … just not an ambitious fella. He liked weed and the sofa,” she said. “I literally opened the window and threw his s–t in the street. I just got so fed up.”
But he returned, enraged that another man had walked Ray home.
“I hear what I think is thunder. It wasn’t thunder. He was pulling down the fire escape and crawling up the side of the building and he jumps through the window of my living room.
“We had a real ruckus . . . I bit his thumb and the blood went all over. It was bad. I felt really terrible about it because I really loved him very much.”
There is no bad blood with her ex, said Ray, who has been married to lawyer and musician John Cusimano since 2005.
“He still texts me to this day,” she said of her former flame. “He sends me occasional videos of whales and children playing and scenes from Brazil, which is very sweet. He asks about my mother and my brother and my sister. And I usually just respond politely.”
After the boyfriend drama and the muggings, Ray hightailed it out of NYC and moved back to her native Glens Falls in upstate New York.
“I bought a used Ford Ranger . . . pickup truck. I had to learn how to drive. . . . I started my life all over again, and I worked any place they would let me,” she recalled.
At one of her jobs, a specialty food market in Albany called Cowan & Lobel, Ray began teaching her “30-Minute Meals” — the rest is food history.
The Emmy winner hosted her daytime talk show “Rachael Ray” from 2006 to 2023 and gushed over her celebrity guests — many of which were actually good cooks “that got their hands dirty.”
“Oh, so many, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Hudson . . . really wonderful cooks . . . President Clinton, John McCain, incredible, people that, I was told and instructed by the folks that represent some of these people, ‘They’re not going to do this. They won’t do that.’ Yes they do,” she said.
“I mean Gwyneth was eating out of the pan with her hand.”