The Surprising Endurance of Martha Stewart’s “Entertaining”
Stewart’s first book includes menus for occasions including a midnight omelette supper, a Chinese banquet, and a holiday-cookie party for children.Photo illustration by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin
Afew weeks ago, when I got an e-mail from Martha Stewart’s publicist, informing me that Stewart had agreed to a phone interview—“tomorrow at 11:15 for ten minutes,” he wrote, in response to my request for “as much time as she is willing to give”—my heart began to pound. I’d find it disorienting to talk to any very famous person, to bring the intimate, illusory relationship between celebrity and civilian rudely crashing down to earth. But this felt like something more. The issue wasn’t only the magnitude of Stewart’s celebrity but also the nature of it. In the first two decades of her media career, which began in the early eighties, Stewart’s lavish, ruthlessly overachieving approach to the domestic arts—advanced in such austerely titled books as “Weddings” and “Great Parties,” and also in syndicated newspaper columns, a cable show, and her eponymous magazine—made her a totalizing cultural figure, one whose suggestions tended to come across as commands. I was terrified that the conversation would somehow lay bare my own incompetence, my failure to comply.
More than a century into the debate about whether a corporation is a person, Stewart affirmed that a person can be a corporation—a public one, as of 1999, when shares of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia surged to almost two billion dollars in value. And though the insider-trading scandal that landed her in prison, in 2004, dinged her reputation, it ultimately proved that she was untouchable, paving the way for a winking, irreverent iteration of her persona. In the past decade, Stewart has cannily embraced her status as a kitsch object—the chilly, aging doyenne of “homekeeping” who hangs out with Snoop Dogg and poses for Sports Illustrated yet can seemingly do napkin origami in her sleep.
The occasion for the call was the reissue of “Entertaining,” Stewart’s first book, from 1982, long out of print. In the wake of two 2024 documentaries about Stewart, copies had become scarce, sparking bidding wars on resale websites. In response, Clarkson Potter released a facsimile edition, with not a word changed—not even “Oriental,” which recurs in reference to Asian cooking, or the dedication to Stewart’s now ex-husband, Andy, whom she divorced in 1990. In the introduction, Stewart writes, “As I read all the classics, what remained most vivid in my memory were the banquet scenes in Sir Walter Scott, the Roman punch dinners in Edith Wharton novels, and the country weekends in Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina.’ ” Her own book trades on a similarly absorbing, escapist allure. Warm, gauzy photographs depict a rustic kitchen hung with antique baskets and gleaming copper pots; militantly tidy arrangements of canapés; and a radiant young Stewart in a spotless white dress.
The book is organized into menus for events that are hard to imagine attending, let alone hosting, in 2025. A four-page spread gives instructions for a “midnight omelette supper for thirty,” featuring a pound of herb butter, an array of pastries with homemade jams, and two quarts of chocolate mousse. For that occasion, Stewart recommends that one begin making omelettes at 11 P.M. and “serve undersized rolls, because they are lighter and daintier at night.” For a “soirée dansante” (dance party) with desserts for forty—palmiers, poached pears topped with crystallized violets, kiwi tartlets—she wonders, Why not “add champagne; add ballgowns and black tie”?
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.”
A few days before the L.A. Dodgers were set to play the Toronto Blue Jays in the first game of the World Series, I found a menu for the occasion in another new book, “Let’s Party,” by Dan Pelosi, an Instagram star who self-identifies as a “gay male Pinterest mom.” For screening a big game or an awards show, Pelosi prescribes a “spread of perfect apps”: coconut shrimp; honey-mustard chicken wings; pineapple-and-fennel pulled-pork sliders; steak nachos with homemade pico de gallo and two types of cheese; a creamy crab dip capped with Ritz crackers; and caramelized banana pudding. Pulling it off would require trips to three different grocery stores and untold hours of exacting, minute tasks. It sounded perfect.
On Thursday, the day before the game, I braised the pork shoulder and mixed the crab dip, feeling triumphant in my preparedness. On Friday afternoon, I found myself in an exhilarated fugue state. Doors and drawers flew open and shut as I broiled bananas covered in brown sugar, grilled steaks, and roasted pounds of wings. I chopped scallions, toasted sesame seeds, wrenched lids off of cans of beans and condensed milk. For hours, I thought of nothing but my next move, the narcotic draw of my phone blissfully suppressed. It didn’t go without a hitch. Fifteen minutes before my guests were due, the point at which Pelosi suggested I deep-fry the shrimp, I had failed to so much as set up my dredging station. I noticed that the black T-shirt I’d been wearing since 7 A.M. was smeared with whipped cream. The doorbell rang.
In “Entertaining,” Stewart describes the role of a host as similar to that of a theatre director. My friends played their parts, crowing over the buffet, piling their plates with sliders and wings, shouting at the television. But Stewart also knows that the moments that truly make a party—in “Entertaining,” she recalls an impromptu piano concert of fifties ballads—can’t be planned. Those moments “were unpredictable, and yet they had something to do with the way a hostess had organized each gathering,” she writes. “She had . . . made everyone comfortable enough to be his own natural, impulsive, expressive social self.”
Somewhere around the seventh inning, the gaggle of small children in the house conspired, without adult aid or input, to turn off the lights in a bedroom, plug in a strobe light, cue up a trance song on the speaker, and begin to mosh. Food was served at this party-within-a-party: each small raver carried a sleeve of Ritz crackers, pilfered from an enormous box I’d gotten at Costco; the floor practically glittered with crumbs. By the end of the night, I was thoroughly exhausted, and ready to do it again. ♦
Published in the print edition of the November 10, 2025, issue, with the headline “Tableau Vivant.”
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