To most readers, this will seem like fantasy. To Stewart, it was a snapshot of real life. She grew up in a large, middle class Polish American family in New Jersey, with parents who often received guests; she honed a taste for fine things while working as a stockbroker in Manhattan. In the seventies, she and her husband, a book publisher, decamped to Westport, Connecticut, where they restored an old farmhouse and she started a catering business. Stewart regarded her social scene as less fussy than that of the “fancy Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue matrons,” she told me over the phone. “I was a little bit more casual. I liked antiques and I loved beautiful things, but I was not a fanatic about butlers.”
Yet in the past three decades much of home-cooking culture has developed in revolt against what many see as Stewart’s punctilious ethos. Ina Garten, whose career was buoyed by an early shout-out in Martha Stewart Living, distinguished herself as breezy and laid-back, conspiratorially assuring her audience that “store-bought is fine.” Nigella Lawson, endearingly prone to sloshing and spilling, made her name with the archly titled “How to Be a Domestic Goddess,” in 2000. In 2010, the same year Garten published “How Easy Is That?,” Vintage reprinted Laurie Colwin’s “Home Cooking,” from 1988, in which Colwin recalls throwing dinner parties in a studio that didn’t have a kitchen or a sink.
Alison Roman, who has sometimes been hailed as the anti Martha Stewart, made “unfussy” the gold standard of millennial hosting with her purposefully louche cookbook “Nothing Fancy,” in 2019. “I have always been allergic to the word ‘entertaining,’ ” Roman wrote, “which to me implies that there’s a show, something performative at best and inauthentic at worst.” A theme of Samin Nosrat’s new cookbook, “Good Things,” published in September, is letting go of perfectionism when cooking for guests. “You’re not always going to have the very best ingredients, the right platter, or a lime instead of a lemon,” Nosrat writes. “It doesn’t matter. No one will remember.”
When I mentioned to Stewart the fact that “you don’t have to be Martha Stewart” has become a cliché, she laughed. She sees herself less as a cold-blooded micromanager than as a creative, scrappy person who takes pleasure in executing a specific vision. One of the events that first got her noticed as a caterer was a reception for an American-folk-art exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory, to which she brought her own live chickens, their cages perched on mounds of hay. When I asked if the room had smelled like a coop, Stewart seemed to recoil. “Oh, no! No, no,” she assured me. “My chickens—they don’t poop in public.”
Such is life in Marthaland, where homemaking tasks are plucked from the realm of everyday drudgery and elevated to a pure pursuit of excellence. Stewart talks about cooking, gardening, and decorating with the equanimity of an endurance athlete. “Entertaining, by its nature, is an expansive gesture, and demands an expansive state of mind,” she writes in “Entertaining”—a line that recalls the vaguely philosophical memoirs of retired tennis players. She never claimed that her approach was easy, inexpensive, or suited to everyone, only that her guidance was there for anyone who heard the call. “It was totally doable, what I was doing,” Stewart told me, “if you put in the time and the energy, and didn’t mind getting exhausted.”
Not long after my call with Stewart, I felt moved to attempt some ambitious entertaining of my own. I wanted to achieve perfect synchrony as dishes went in and out of the oven, to retrieve infrequently used platters from their high cabinets, to have my guests ooh and ah over my efforts. “Entertaining provides a good excuse to put things in order,” Stewart writes, a mantra that struck me as both practical and profound.
Among this season’s new cookbooks are a number devoted to hosting, written by millennials who seem fairly Stewart-minded. “Dinner Party Animal,” by the social-media darling Jake Cohen, is helpfully type A, complete with detailed prep schedules and “game time pep talks.” “It’s time to step it up,” Cohen writes. “You don’t have to turn into Martha Stewart overnight, but you very well may end up following in her footsteps.”
