Goblets of borscht, turkey-shaped madeleines: why Martha Stewart’s fantastical menus are still an inspiration
The celebrations were imminent and the greenhouse ready to accommodate – among the orchids, in unseasonable November warmth – an intimate Hawaiian luau.The table was set with giant clam shells for serving vessels and miniature hibachis for grilling Dungeness crab.Somebody had found a small, pink pineapple and secured it on the watermelon like a brooch.The hostess considered the merits of a hula dancer, but in the end settled on a more succinct spectacle: a 19lb suckling pig, enwreathed with sub-tropical flowers and caparisoned in bronze.It was, and could only ever have been, a Martha Stewart affair.
This was before the media empire, in more innocent days, when Stewart was a caterer in Connecticut.She was brilliant even then.It takes a spark of something dazzling, even dangerous, to notice a single detail – an orchid, say – and from this to extrapolate a 20-person luau.A while later, Stewart wrote about the party in Entertaining, her 1982 cookbook debut, lushly photographed and with step-by-step instructions for chicken wings with banana.“The pig wore a necklace of starfruit,” she explained.
It speaks to Stewart’s generational talent for nonsense that this isn’t even in the top 10 wildest sentences in the book,I have been thinking a lot about Entertaining recently,Last year I bought a bargain first edition on eBay, ostensibly in the name of serious research,I was mesmerised,It is, in short, the greatest work of literature on entertaining ever written – a cookbook, technically, but in reality something stranger and more opaque.
Stewart is a master of far-out wisdom.For those without a large dining room, why not set up a couple of small, round tables in the bedroom with table linen to match the bedsheets? The evening will be enlivened by the implicit threat that it could turn, upon some imperceptible social undercurrent, into a swingers’ party.If you don’t care for fussy trinkets, you might choose a table centrepiece of a single huge Bermuda onion, or “a convoluted brown tree fungus in which [to] fix a delicate branch or a bloom”.Think about it.Be prepared.
You could consider hiring a balalaika player to soundtrack a Russian-themed dinner party, or borrow a silver samovar from friends.The problems with Stewart are many and predictable.Yes, she is out of touch.She represents the worst of striving Waspy hostess culture.These recipes – the goblets of borscht, the turkey-shaped madeleines – are unrealistic for the ordinary cook.
I know these grievances because they are the grievances I have had with Stewart, with all people for whom entertaining is an ambassadorial affair,And yet it is all so spectacularly beside the point to approach Stewart along these lines, like chastising the moon for its eerie, beautiful light,The trouble is, we’ve resented entertaining for as long as we’ve had the luxury of doing it,About a century ago we invented cocktail parties, a smart workaround for sit-down dinner parties that ensured we could spend less time and more money eating worse food with people we don’t like,By the 1950s, with cocktail parties and their backlash in full force, writers made up solutions like after-dinner wine parties and sitting-room dinner parties.
Now, in the long shadow of the dinner party mania of the 1980s we avoid such words altogether.Instead we have people over, in the breezy, Alison Roman-inspired way, her delightful cookbooks having become standard setters for anti-ostentatious taste.Now it’s Le Creuset dishes, not silver samovars, that signal a certain coy tastefulness.This is how things work: action, reaction, the timeless art of feeding people changing as fashion dictates.But I have to wonder whether, in our desire to never repeat the crimes of the 80s, we have overcorrected – whether we have thrown the starfruit-necklaced piglet out with the bathwater.
Among the postmodern elements of Stewart-style entertaining, there is a truth that we often forget: that entertaining, in whatever form it takes, should be fun.This is the entire point.Fun is not the same as casualness.It is not the same as ease.Fun comes from recognising that entertaining at home can and should be different to the usual order of things, which is why Stewart’s advocacy for tempura parties, omelette brunches for 60 and dinners of half a dozen varieties of soup delight me so much.
They are reminders that great entertaining comes not from trying to replicate a restaurant at home, but imagining the whimsical, fantastical, unmarketable feasts that any serious establishment would never dare.This U-turn on my part has been electrifying.Out with the sincere, in with the absurd.I have been recommending Entertaining – a cookbook from which I will surely never cook – to anyone who will listen.There are lessons to be learned here, I tell people.
There are visions that only a true seer could decode, like “Neoclassic Dinner for Eight to Ten”.I’ve done this safe in the knowledge that most people will never actually be able to get a copy, those rare old books now being collector’s items that go for hundreds of dollars.But this year, 43 years since it was first published and into a general political climate not so different from the 80s in which it was conceived, Entertaining has just been rereleased.It is a new printing for a new generation of culinary fantasists.“Cook remaining 100 lobsters,” Stewart tells us, in one of the most spectacular lines ever written in English, in or outside a cookbook.
It is the best, worst influence on cooking any of us could have dreamed.Ruby Tandoh’s All Consuming is published by Serpent’s Tail at £18.99.To order a copy for £16.14 visit guardianbookshop.
comEntertaining by Martha Stewart is published by Clarkson Potter (on 1 December in the UK).To order a copy, visit guardianbookshop.com
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