What replicating a cocktail party from Martha Stewart’s first book taught me about Martha, and the good life
The first time I remember being aware of Martha Stewart was when a childhood friend told me about a T-shirt she saw in a store window. It read, she giggled, wide-eyed, “I want to be Martha. That bitch can do everything.” We were too young to say “bitch”; the thrill came more from seeing an illicit word in the open than agreeing with the shirt’s meaning. But I understood the sentiment as at once laudatory and cutting: Martha can do everything, yes, but the “bitch” is obviously not a loving reclamation of an insult.
This would have been around 1996, by which point Stewart was about to launch her own media and merchandising company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. A fitting prefix: She was everywhere. She had sold millions of books, launched her magazine and television show — both named Martha Stewart Living — and had a homeware partnership with Kmart. She was, as Time wrote, a “guru of good taste.” She’d go on to have more partnerships, more shows, her whole thing with Snoop Dogg, and now 100 books. Stewart is, by her own description, a “self-made billionaire.” By the time I understood who she was, she was just Martha. It was too late to form an opinion about her; to do so would be like having a personal opinion about a law of thermodynamics.
It is too easy to forget now that Stewart came from somewhere, though even that has been made into fodder for her brand. When her past is mentioned, it’s in service of a narrative trajectory from humble but determined beginnings to deserved fame. But the past I’m talking about is the time when Martha Stewart was a woman trying to get your attention instead of knowing she already had it — when her presence in your life wasn’t guaranteed.
1982’s Entertaining was Stewart’s first shot at becoming a mononym, though she was clearly well-positioned. She had been a contributor to House Beautiful, managed a food boutique, and ran a successful catering business that often served well-heeled clients in New York and its suburbs. When Stewart’s then-husband, the president of the publishing company Harry N. Abrams, Inc., hired her to cater a book release party, the executives present were reportedly impressed enough to see a book in her future.
Entertaining is a weird book. It’s part cookbook, part hosting guide, part gratuitous gawking at Stewart’s life meant to inspire envious awe or awful envy. It’s a book that sets the stage for Stewart’s ongoing divisiveness, inspiring some to believe they can even as it shows others that they could never. It purports to teach the reader how to throw various kinds of parties. Not via suggestions for what you might serve at a “cocktail party” or “dinner party,” but with specifics for, say, “Oriental” cocktails for eight to 12, a midnight omelet supper for 30, a country luncheon wedding for 175. Each party has a set menu and theme, as well as tips for making food look beautiful, choosing music, and scanning art books for tablescape inspiration.
And yet, Stewart insists in the introduction that modern entertaining is “informal, relaxed, and expressive, based not on intimidating prescriptions and pretensions.” It’s about your tastes, your creativity. Stewart suggests her book should serve merely as inspiration — even as she supplies graph paper guides for how to make expertly piped sugar cookies and a gingerbread mansion.
Stewart described Entertaining as a textbook for homemakers, something that she felt didn’t exist at the time. “What I did in this book was try to capture sort of the essence of what we all like to do when we entertain … make wonderful food from really good recipes, set a pretty table or a beautiful buffet, make flower arrangements cut from our own gardens,” she told NPR in 2011, assuming we all have our own gardens. I wanted to see what readers in 1982 might have seen in Stewart — what those who paid no attention to the masthead of House Beautiful or lived anywhere near Connecticut began, from that moment, to want. There seemed no better way than to throw one of Stewart’s parties myself, exactly as she had written it.
My first thought was that there wasn’t going to be enough food. For Stewart, that is the point. A cocktail party is supposed to be “a gracious prologue to the theater, a concert, a large charity dinner, or just a late dinner in a restaurant,” she writes, introducing one of her party menus. The food should be “an interesting snack to ward off hunger pangs,” not a meal in itself. But I invited everyone over for 6:30 p.m., and there was no late dinner to be had afterward. Already I had failed.
But the menu for “Cocktails for Twenty-Five: Many Tastes” was so perfectly retro. We’d be interestingly snacking on snow peas piped with St. Albans cheese, mini leek and smoked salmon quiches, carpaccio on french bread spread with herb butter and dabbed with green sauce, pate on apple slices, blini with caviar and sour cream, almond-stuffed dates wrapped in bacon, endive leaves smeared with herb cheese, and “Roquefort grapes,” green grapes coated in a blue cheese sauce and rolled in chopped nuts. All this would be washed down with a “white wine bar.”
I do know how to throw a party. Typically, I look up recipes in my downtime, finding options that will accommodate my friends’ dietary restrictions and be more fun to cook than a bunch of Trader Joe’s mini spanakopita tossed on a baking sheet. I buy cheeses and nuts from my neighborhood specialty stores, and throw together punch in my cut-glass punchbowl. I light some candles and bring out the few pieces of heirloom silver I can fit into my kitchen.
You don’t have to follow the menus in Entertaining; Stewart knows that readers are perfectly capable of serving a dish from one section and a drink from another. But you don’t structure a book around set menus for various occasions if you don’t intend for readers to do exactly what you did.
So, no, this was not about creating a party to express my own tastes. It was about recreating Stewart’s within the ambiance of my own home. I had to be sure not to invite any vegan friends, as there wouldn’t be a single thing for them to eat. There would also be no punch bowl. But there was a certain allure in just following instructions with the promise of a “professional” party at the end. It meant that there was no worrying about whether guests would like my cheese selection, because they had been selected by someone far more knowledgeable. I immediately saw how Stewart’s authority could captivate, how the anxious mind could be tamed by the blessed instruction of power.
The party was on a Monday, so I began cooking over the weekend. I figured I could spend a little time prepping some things that could be frozen and reheated the day of, and blending sauces and herb butter used to assemble the bites. I began around 10 a.m. Saturday, blending pate, rolling quiche dough, and sauteeing leeks. Suddenly, it was 4 p.m. The day had gone and I had what felt like very little to show for it. I hadn’t even made dinner. I began to dread Monday. Even with all the freezing and prepping, there was so much assembly to be done, so many things to not just make but make beautiful. I hadn’t even thought about flowers, or what I was going to wear, or when I could scrub the toilets.
Are we too hard on Martha? “Ms. Stewart makes an easy target,” Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times in 1997, “having held out an ideal of butter-churn perfection in these microwave times. (‘I really want people to get out their sewing machines again,’ she once opined. ‘I know we don’t have time, but just thinking about it is a step in the right direction.’)” It’s a noble ideal. We are too pressed for time, too enamored of convenience and multitasking to give any one endeavor our undivided attention, and to experience the sublime that often follows.
The most constant accusation lobbed at Stewart is that she’s off-puttingly ambitious, though of course it never comes with a rubric for why ambition is off-putting in some and admirable in others. Her constant work created “a schedule most mortals would have a tough time keeping up with. Which may be why her husband of 27 years, whom she has frequently called ‘my best friend,’ threw in the towel,” wrote Susan Puckett in the Sun-Sentinel 1989. It was such a sexist suggestion that my jaw actually dropped reading it.
It may be that Stewart did her job so well that people no longer associate her with her most radical-for-the-time ideas, so thoroughly did they dissipate into modern culture. Decorating your table with thrifted mismatched china? That’s Martha. In Entertaining, she suggests using what you’ve got, like hanging old quilts in your garage to make it feel festive, setting up dining space in a bedroom if that’s the biggest room in the house, and using an old doll collection to decorate your tables, which, sure. Any garnishes are usually herbs or other ingredients you’re using in a different part of a menu. She’s also a big fan of Boursin, and always notes when you can make things ahead and bake them directly from the freezer. For every reminder that only wild mushrooms will do, there’s acknowledgment that store-bought mayonnaise is perfectly acceptable.
At first pass, Stewart’s advice, in Entertaining and onward, seems to be in service of showing readers that the slow, intentional living we claim to want is perfectly achievable. “One of the things Martha is most often accused of is being too upper-upper level. She puts caviar on something, and they (her critics) dwell on that,” Alan Mirkin, then-vice president of Random House, told Puckett. “But that is not Martha’s hallmark; rather, it’s making things look beautiful without costing hardly any money. The fact is, a lot of what she does is attainable by the average housewife.” Mirkin recalled Stewart saying that she did not want Entertaining to be intimidating to the reader.
But Martha’s professed desire for relatability was undermined by allegations of plagiarism, and later her arrest for lying and obstruction over a stock trade. Neither was enough to ruin her reputation single handedly, but did contribute to a parallel narrative of someone who cares more about fame than integrity. Here were refreshing pinholes in her sails to reassure us that nobody could be that perfect, that of course there was a catch.
Because will you look at this book? The way Stewart perches on an oiled wooden chair on the cover, folding linens in front of a table where the teal ribbons on the napkins match the goblets? The way her perfectly set waves echo the ruffles of her pristine white collar and sunlight catches on pyramids of oranges and pears on silver platters? The way each shrimp has been painstakingly wrapped in a blanched snow pea? Who has multiple sets of plates for different party themes, and that many vintage baskets? Who the fuck lives like this? No matter how much Stewart says you can mismatch and get messy and make it your own, her haters have a point.
On the day of the party, I tried to get myself into the mood of a 1982 housewife, a woman who wanted to invite that kind of perfection into her home. I put on a playlist of hits from the year, rolling Roquefort grapes to Toto’s “Africa” and Steve Miller Band’s “Abracadabra” and trying to feel this moment, as I lined grapes on wax paper, with all of myself. I sliced open snow peas and piped them with Brie, topped each carpaccio with herb sauce, overlapped endive leaves like the petals of a blooming flower. These tasks were repetitive, at some points meditative, and at others put me at risk of injury. And they took up my entire day.
The first of the 20 or so guests arrived as I was laying the last sprigs of dill on the blini. When I placed the platter on the dining table I realized it was beautiful. I used what I already had: a piece of fabric my grandparents got on their honeymoon in Mexico that I always use as a tablecloth, platters my partner and I received as wedding gifts, a midcentury modern coffee percolator repurposed as a vase. Nothing new, but never before in this arrangement, never with so many small, delightful offerings overflowing on my table like jewels from a treasure chest.
Each subsequent ring of the doorbell produced coos of excitement over the spread. Stewart was right: Guests were shocked to see a snow pea stuffed with cheese! Over and over came raves for the food. People who thought they hated blue cheese loved the Roquefort grapes. The endive with a swipe of Boursin, the leaf hooding the sprig of watercress like a monk, was a perfect one-bite salad, bitter and peppery and lustily creamy. Stewart’s quiche crust was tender with fat, and the carpaccio’s herb sauce was funky and bright. Her airy blini had just a hint of fermented tang, and her pate the mellowness of a faraway saxophone.
Through the food and wine and flowers and candles, that wonderful alchemy occurred: a gathering of friends, some strangers to each other, became a party. There were shrieks of laughter, huddled conversation. A child stuffed an endive into her mouth. A group of people on the floor pored over Stewart’s book, laughing over her menu for a 175-person wedding, which instructs the reader to “cook 100 lobsters” in one day and, on the next one, “cook remaining 100 lobsters.” Wine bottles clattered, candles burned down, friends promised to call each other. All this on a Monday.
I wondered why all of my parties hadn’t felt this warm. Was it because I hadn’t provided mini quiches? Did the party live in the meticulous arrangement of dozens of tiny bites?
Stewart was right in that cocktails for 25 were doable without help. It felt like she was right about everything: All the work, the decoration, the detail was for something. Even though the work was tedious at times, and resulted in some mid-back pain, I had a sense of accomplishment that I don’t normally get from parties where I throw out some dip and cheese and call it a day. Maybe it was because everyone knew this was Stewart’s party, and we could approach it like a strange art project. We shared in the absurdity of a menu none of us would ever have chosen, but were charmed to find we mostly liked.
But knowing I could just do this was electrifying. I wondered what it would be like to do it all the time, and if I could afford it.
There is no ignoring that Entertaining was published in 1982. These were the early Reagan years after all, the time of the yuppie, with new conservatism masquerading as the natural endpoint of social pushes to enshrine civil rights and create a more equitable society. Revolution boiled down to the right to live comfortably. The freedom to do what you want turned into the freedom to make money. Of course a well-executed cocktail party could be disguised as a modern act of self-expression. I had never thought of Martha Stewart as a product of Reaganism, but now, paging through her first cookbook, it felt impossible to unsee.
All cookbooks are exercises in aspiration. You want your life to at least in part resemble what’s in the book, for these meals to come out of your kitchen, to know what the author knows. In 1982, the knowledge Stewart was selling wasn’t of new cuisines or countercultural lifestyles. She was a caterer to the rich selling uncomplicated, unchallenged wealth. The promise of Entertaining is that you can throw a party like they throw in Greenwich, and in so doing, emulate the rich.
A hundred books later, that new conservatism is back, or maybe Stewart’s continued popularity is proof it never really left. Tradwives may be at the mantle now, building careers off the message that women would just be happier if the feminist movement had never happened. But there is a lie within most tradwife content, to its message that you could, in fact should, be living like this. Off-screen there is always money, or hired help, to make it feasible to devote a day to stretching cheese in a designer kitchen.
Stewart doesn’t lie in Entertaining. She tells you her life story, from modeling to stockbroking to marrying a wealthy publisher, so you can understand that hers is not an average life. She poses with hired staff and notes when you will need them. She does not promise that you can live exactly like she does, and she is clear about the company she keeps. “Few people in fact can escape for a lifetime a call to host a business or club affair, fête a friend or dignitary, or simply repay an ungainly accumulation of social debts,” she writes in the headnotes for a cocktail party for 200, playfully acknowledging her social circle, and surely with the knowledge that most people will never fête a dignitary. But if you want a taste of that life, Entertaining is a step-by-step guide. Do exactly this, Stewart says, and you can taste it for a night.
Perhaps the Greenwich of it all is why, until now, Stewart had never held much sway for me. That’s not to say I’ve never been tempted by a richer life, just that the one Stewart lives — with its gardens and chickens that more resemble Marie Antoinette’s hamlet than a working farm, with its big, isolated houses and parties that require staff even at their simplest — is not one I’ve ever aspired to.
I still don’t want a mansion or a staff, or to surround myself with titans of industry. What I do aspire to is the time and money to make the people in my life feel celebrated. And while I don’t need 60 handmade blini to do that, I was still struck by the joy in my friends’ faces when they saw not that I had made everything, but that I had made it for them. I cannot afford for this to be my life, and even if I had the money to quit my job I don’t think I’d spend each day planning Italian buffets and omelet parties. But what Stewart knows is that there are times when mere cooking should be elevated to entertaining. That’s what the money is for.
