The surprising endurance of Martha Stewart’s “entertainment.”
To most readers, this will seem like a fantasy. For Stewart, this was a snapshot of real life. She grew up in a large, middle-class Polish-American family in New Jersey, and her parents often entertained guests; She honed her taste for beautiful things while working as a stock broker in Manhattan. In the 1970s, she and her husband, a book publisher, moved to Westport, Connecticut, where they restored an old farmhouse and started a catering business. Stewart considered her social scene less interesting than that of “the posh ladies of Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue,” she told me over the phone. “I was a bit informal. I liked antiques and I liked nice things, but I wasn’t a fanatic about servants.”
However, in the past three decades, much of home cooking culture has evolved in revolt against what many consider to be the meticulous Stuart ethos. Ina Garten, whose career was fueled by early trends Martha Stewart Livingcharacterized herself as breezy and relaxed, conspiratorially assuring her audience that “store-buying is a good thing.” Nigella Lawson, who has an endearing penchant for spilling and pouring, made her name with the arch-titled How to Be a Domestic Goddess in 2000. In 2010, the same year Garten published How Easy Is This?, Vintage reprinted Laurie Colwyn’s Home Cooking, from 1988, in which Colwyn recalls throwing dinner parties in a studio that had no kitchen or sink.
Alison Roman, sometimes hailed as the anti-Martha Stewart, made “simplicity” the gold standard for hosting millennials with her loose cookbook Nothing Fancy in 2019. “I’ve always been sensitive to the word ‘entertaining,’ which to me means there’s a show, something that is performative at best and inauthentic at worst,” Roman wrote. One of the themes of Samin Nosrat’s new cookbook, “The Good Stuff,” published in September, is abandoning perfection when cooking for guests. “You won’t always get the best ingredients, the right dish, or lemon instead of lemon,” Nosrat wrote. “It doesn’t matter. No one will remember.”
When I mentioned to Stewart that the fact that “you don’t have to be Martha Stewart” has become a cliche, she laughed. She sees herself less as a cold-blooded micromanager and more as a creative, skeptical person who enjoys implementing a specific vision. One of the events that first caught her attention as a caterer was a reception for an American folk art exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory, to which she brought her live chickens, their cages placed on stacks of straw. When I asked if the room smelled like a barn, Stewart seemed to recoil. “Oh, no, no, no,” she assured me. “My chickens don’t defecate in public.”
Such is life in Marthaland, where housekeeping tasks are lifted from the world of daily drudgery and elevated to the level of pure pursuit of excellence. Stuart talks about cooking, gardening, and decorating with equanimity. “Entertainment, by its very nature, is an expansive gesture, and requires an expansive state of mind,” she wrote in “Entertaining” — a line that recalls the obscure philosophical memoirs of retired tennis players. She never claimed that her approach was easy, inexpensive, or one-size-fits-all, rather her guidance was there for anyone who heard the call. “It was completely doable, what I was doing, if you put in the time and energy, and didn’t mind getting burned out,” Stewart told me.
Shortly after my call with Stuart, I felt like trying out some ambitious entertainment of my own. I wanted to achieve perfect synchronization as dishes went in and out of the oven, pull rarely used dishes out of their high cabinets, and impress my guests with my efforts. “Entertainment provides a good excuse for putting things in order,” Stuart writes, a slogan that struck me as both practical and profound.
Among this season’s new cookbooks is a number dedicated to hosting, written by millennials who seem to have a bit of a Stuart mentality. “Dinner Party Animal,” by social media darling Jake Cohen, is helpfully genre-A, complete with elaborate prep schedules and “peppy playtime conversations.” “It’s time to step up,” Cohen writes. “You don’t have to turn into Martha Stewart overnight, but you might end up following in her footsteps.”