Most readers will find this fantastic. For Stewart, it was a snapshot of real life. She grew up in a large middle-class Polish-American family in New Jersey, whose parents often entertained guests; She honed her taste for fine things while working as a stockbroker in Manhattan. In the seventies, she and her husband, a book publisher, moved to Westport, Connecticut, where they restored an old farmhouse and she opened a restaurant business. Stewart considered her social life less hectic than that of the “fashionable matrons on Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue,” she told me over the phone. “I was a little more laid-back. I liked antiques and pretty things, but I wasn't a butler fanatic.”
However, over the past three decades, much of home cooking culture has evolved in rebellion against what many see as Stewart's fastidious ethos. Ina Garten, whose career was boosted by early recognition in Martha Stewart Livingwas carefree and casual, conspiratorially assuring the audience that “bought is normal.” With a penchant for splashing and spilling, Nigella Lawson made a name for herself with the slyly titled How to Be a Domestic Goddess in 2000. In 2010, the same year Garten published How Easy Is It?, Vintage reprinted Laurie Colvin's 1988 book Home Kitchen, in which Colvin recalls hosting dinner parties in a studio that had no kitchen or sink.
Alison Roman, sometimes called the anti-Martha Stewart, made “low-key” the millennial hosting gold standard in 2019 with her purposefully artsy cookbook, Nothing Fancy. “I’ve always been allergic to the word ‘entertaining,’” Roman wrote, “which to me means that this show is performative at best and inauthentic at worst.” The theme of Samin Nosrat's new cookbook, Good Things, published in September, is avoiding perfectionism when cooking for guests. “You won't always have the best ingredients, the right dish, or lime instead of lemon,” Nosrat writes. “It doesn't matter. Nobody will remember.”
When I mentioned to Stewart that “you don’t have to be Martha Stewart” has become a cliché, she laughed. She sees herself not as a cold-blooded micromanager, but as a creative, messy person who gets pleasure from realizing a certain vision. One of the events that first brought her to attention as a caterer was a reception for an American folk art exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory, where she brought her own live chickens, their cages sitting on piles of hay. When I asked if the room smelled like a chicken coop, Stuart seemed to recoil. “Oh, no! No, no,” she assured me. “My chickens, they don’t poop in public.”
Such is life in Marthaland, where household chores are taken out of the realm of daily routine and elevated to the pure pursuit of perfection. Stewart talks about cooking, gardening and decorating with the equanimity of an endurance athlete. “Entertainment is by its nature an expansive gesture, requiring an expansive state of mind,” she writes in “Entertainment,” a line that recalls a vaguely philosophical memoir by former tennis players. She never claimed that her approach was simple, inexpensive and suitable for everyone, but only that her guidance was available to everyone who heard the call. “What I was doing was doable,” Stewart told me, “if you put in the time and energy and didn’t mind the fatigue.”
Shortly after my call to Stuart, I felt the urge to try some ambitious entertainment of my own. I wanted to create perfect synchronicity as dishes went in and out of the oven, pulling rarely used plates out of tall cabinets and having my guests ooh and ahh at my efforts. “Entertainment provides a good excuse to get organized,” Stewart writes, and I found that mantra to be both practical and profound.
Among the new cookbooks this season are several on hosting, written by millennials who seem to share Stewart's views. “Beast at the Dinner Party,” written by social media darling Jake Cohen, is Type A, complete with a detailed prep schedule and “pep talk during the game.” “It’s time to step up this activity,” Cohen writes. “You don’t have to turn into Martha Stewart overnight, but you might as well follow in her footsteps.”
