Why Martha Stewart Is a “Good Thing”

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Martha Stewartpublished her first book,Entertaining, in 1982, when she was 41 years old. She’d taken a wayward path to it. Raised in a modest Polish-American household in Nutley, New Jersey, Stewart paid for college by working as a model. She earned a BA from Barnard in European history and architectural history but then found a job as a stockbroker. She only came to embrace her love for home and hearth after she and her husband moved from New York to Westport, Connecticut, where they set about restoring an old farmhouse and Stewart began a catering business. Then she publishedEntertaining, a lavishly photographed guide to, among other things, hosting a “Hawaiian Luau for Twenty” and a “Country Pie Party for Fifty.” Along with the grand menus and clear-eyed advice was plenty of empowerment: an impossibly intrepid amateur proving to you that if she can do it, you can, too.

By the 1990s, the subsequent avalanche of books and other brand-building activities had established Stewart as an avatar of a kind of WASP perfectionism; an unflaggingly confident commenter on matters like choosing the right china and planning a wedding; a ubiquitous media mogul; and a constant companion to the home cook.

In cooking, Martha Stewart is, in theory anyway, one of us: no particular culinary training, a scattered repertoire of culinary interests, just fumbling toward a good meal. (Much nicer kitchen, though.) In the way that she places good food within the overall context of a good life, she carries the banner ofBetty Crocker, the mid-20th century General Mills character who offered women not just recipes but advice on managing a budget, running a household, the whole shebang.

The differences between the two extend far beyond the fact that one of these characters is fictional. Stewart is interested in food as one component of a lifestyle, too—even in her first book, she wrote about her enormous vegetable garden and keepsake butcher-block table from her uncle. But unlike Betty Crocker, Stewart wasn’t content just to show you how to make pecan sticky buns. She convinced you with evangelical fervor to haunt tag sales, plant giant vegetable gardens, and collect mismatched china just like she did.

Betty Crocker recipes emphasized results—quick, convenient cooking, a happy family—and Crocker’s creator, Marjorie Child Husted, said that she thought of Crocker as speaking to women at home “doing a job with children, cooking, cleaning on minimal budgets—the whole depressing mess of it.” But if Betty Crocker aimed to make the chore of domesticity easier, for Stewart domesticity was no longer a chore: Cooking a meal at home was a choice Martha and her acolytes made because it was something they relished as the foundation of a life well lived.

Everybody Should Get to Love Something Like Martha Stewart Loves Meringue

Like her craft projects, Stewart’s recipes (and those in the magazine andbooks that bear her name) are as much about the process as the product—that there is pleasure in the process is part of the point. She plans elaborate feasts, she doesn’t shy from complicated preparations, she cuts no corners—she’ll tolerate no crappy American buttercream when only European-style will do. (Asked this year about her famed perfectionism防守,斯图尔特回答说:“作为一个完美ist is not an evil thing.” Perfectionism, on the other hand, in the Martha vernacular, is a “good thing” indeed.) Evenher simplest recipes manage to be aspirational, pulling off the hat trick of being easy and elegant.

And while Stewart’s audience is largely women, her recipes speak to women not as wives and mothers but as creators—talented people who are here because they want to be. (With the stipulation that the kind of time required for a lot of this stuff—not to mention the cost of the raw ingredients—requires a level of class privilege.) In the kitchen, Stewart’s refusal to compromise on care and quality helped elevate home cooking from a mere (unpaid) job to a certain kind of art, just another form of self-expression.

婚礼的书放在一边,斯图尔特完成有限元分析t without harping on a traditionally heterosexual 1950s ideal of the wife making a lovely home for husband and children. The justification for Martha’s projects is the pleasure of their creator and the sharing of whatever dinner she’s labored over with friends or guests—and not some man just home from a day at the office. Stewart came to entertaining after the feminist gains of the 1960s and ’70s, of course, but in her work she helped ratify them: She made the case that to make a good meal at home was, for women, not necessarily to participate in the patriarchy.

In her own life, Stewart’s first and only husband left her in 1987 and she’s basically been a free agent since, famously devoted to her career, famously tireless, and occasionally denigrated for it. AsJoan Didion wrote, Stewart’s “is not a story about a woman who made the best of traditional skills” (though of course she’s done that too, as any episode of any of her cooking shows will demonstrate—Martha’s got kitchen skills by the bucket). No, Stewart’s is “the story about how the sheer nerve of even professionally unskilled women can prevail,” Didion wrote. “The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of ‘feminine’ domesticity but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.” Put another way: Stewart’s relentless ambition is the reason she’s still here today, and it’s the reason we’re still cooking with her.