Copyright The New York Times
In the 43 years since her first cookbook was published, Martha Stewart has modeled many roles for American cooks and homemakers. She created the job of lifestyle influencer long before the internet existed, and effectively invented the charcuterie plate, the vegetable-scape and the butter board. She was a dogged entrepreneur, rising from power caterer to the first self-made female billionaire in the United States. She was a housewife, having walked away from a lucrative Wall Street career to raise chickens and bake bread in a rustic Connecticut farmhouse. Ms. Stewart’s core message — that anyone who is organized and determined enough can cook, entertain, decorate, garden and more — has stayed consistent through the decades. As her platforms evolved from books to magazines to television to YouTube, generations of American cooks have absorbed Ms. Stewart’s standards, her taste and even her color wheel. (Back in the 1990s, she was all about millennial pink and pistachio green, the hues of eggs laid by her famous Araucana chickens). Millions more have followed her 21st-century journey from prison to Snoop Dogg collaborator to Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. But none of that was foreseeable in 1982, when her seminal text, “Entertaining,” first appeared. On Tuesday, Penguin Random House will reissue the book, which was long out of print, bringing the total in print to a million copies — a milestone that calls for a look back at its impact. In the early 1980s, cookbooks by independent authors were an unloved niche of the publishing industry; color photography was reserved for corporate productions like the Time-Life and Betty Crocker series. The best-seller list was dominated by “The Silver Palate Cookbook,” “The Moosewood Cookbook” and its sequel, “The Enchanted Broccoli Forest,” cheerful paperbacks that reflected the culinary and domestic revolutions of the 1970s. Canapés and cocktail parties were out. Casseroles and potlucks were in. “Entertaining” was something new, a lavishly illustrated book of dressy events ranging from A Light Summer Dinner for Eight to Ten, to A Hawaiian Luau for Twenty, to the terrifying Midnight Omelette Party for Thirty — all of which showcase Ms. Stewart and her collections of antique baskets, spotless white dresses and innumerable domestic skills. Today, it can read as an odd hybrid of a professional catering manual, an aspirational but practical cookbook and celebrity lifestyle porn. But back then, “it was stunning,” said Mollie Katzen, the author of the Moosewood books, which grew out of Moosewood Restaurant, a vegetarian cooperative in Ithaca, N.Y. She hand-lettered and illustrated every recipe in her books, but said it didn’t occur to her to include a picture of herself. “We were all hippies and everything was collectivized and God forbid you have your own persona,” she said. “Martha was obviously unapologetic about being wealthy and gorgeous and having a big house to entertain people. And she just goes for it.” Perhaps because it was priced at $35 (about $117 in today’s money), “Entertaining” was never a best seller. But it was an undeniable hit, reprinted six times in the year after publication as Ms. Stewart worked with the press and flattering articles appeared. Not all the reviews were positive. “So here’s this beautiful woman, with her former-model looks and her chic clientele, who obviously has it made,” read one in The Miami Herald. “No doubt she has an army of cooks working for her, so why shouldn’t she enjoy giving parties?” Ms. Stewart, 84, dismisses the blowback against luxurious settings and beautiful food. “Some people said it was too intimidating, and that nobody would be able to do these kinds of parties,” she said. “But everybody tries. The object is to get people to try.” And “everybody” did seem to try. By 1987, she had introduced a line of kitchen and home products at Kmart. In 1990, the first issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine, the cornerstone of her media empire, appeared. The chef Carla Hall’s career was just beginning, with a catering business she ran out of her home. “I was just starting to appreciate the business side of creating a moment with food and décor, and Martha was at the center of that,” she said. “I got obsessed with tiny tea sandwiches and small food like stuffed cherry tomatoes, and shopped for silver trays at estate sales, just like she said.” As baby boomers looked to Julia (Child) and Marcella (Hazan) as all-knowing experts in French and Italian food, subsequent generations drank in Martha as the authority on everything domestic. There were others: B. Smith, a restaurateur and, like Ms. Stewart, a former model, broke through soon after.After its start in 1997, the Food Network began minting lifestyle stars like Paula Deen, Sandra Lee and Ina Garten, whose store-bought-is-fine message was a gentler alternative to Ms. Stewart’s firm hand. Meghan Markle, Joanna Gaines and many others have also planted their flags. But no one has matched the range of Ms. Stewart, who also gathered gardening, organizing, decorating and weddings under the umbrella of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. The company went public in 1999, making her a billionaire. Five years later, she faced sensation and scandal, convicted of lying to federal prosecutors and served five months in prison. As Alison Roman wrote in the introduction to her best-selling 2021 cookbook “Nothing Fancy: Unfussy Food for Having People Over”: “I’ve always been allergic to the word ‘entertaining.’” Her book editor, she said in a phone interview, tried to dissuade her from writing a book on the subject at all. Ms. Roman said she embraced “messy” as a philosophy and an aesthetic partly in response to Ms. Stewart’s standards. “Everything perfect, everything twee, everything pretty,” she said. “That was never going to be me.” Growing up with Ms. Stewart seems to have intimidated some cooks, convincing them that a dinner party requires matching plates, serving platters and homemade desserts. Katherine Lewin, 34, started the festive dinner-party supply store Big Night in Brooklyn in 2021 and has expanded to the West Village and Upper East Side of Manhattan. She said she has become adept at providing dinner-party therapy, often to manage Martha-related anxiety. “She legitimized entertaining as not just a hobby for a stay-at-home wife, but something that took care and thought and intention and deserved to be treated with rigor.” The new book is a reprint of the original, not a revision; each copy includes a note apologizing for “language that is no longer in use” — like references to “Oriental” recipes. And Ms. Stewart’s insistence that all it takes to throw glamorous parties is determination and organization hasn’t aged well. Her privilege is visible on every page, while the cooks, gardeners, and cleaners who did most of the work remain largely unseen. What some women saw in the glossy pages early on was an alarming effort to push them back to the home and kitchen. When the journalist Susan Faludi published “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women” in 1991, she cited Martha Stewart’s popularity as a prime example of anti-feminist messaging.
