Martha and the iceberg
Hello! Happy Friday. I couldn’t get over the latest Martha Stewart news cycle, so I thought way too much about it and wrote something.
A few weeks ago, Martha Stewart drank an iceberg. Aboard a luxury cruise ship sailing near Greenland, she presumably clinked glasses with some other uber-rich somebody and then downed a cocktail cooled with melting ice(berg).
The internet, predictably, got heart palpitations. Eventually, environmental experts weighed in and decreed that it is, in fact, okay to drink iceberg ice under certain conditions, including, apparently, on a five-figure luxury cruise when you are a hundred-millionaire professional domestic goddess. I’m not totally convinced, but I am certain one of the many people in Martha’s ear should have intervened and suggested she stick to photos of non-ingested glaciers, if only to avoid the hassle.
And as I was engaged in no fewer than three separate group texts about Martha and the iceberg, I got to thinking: Why do I and so many others find this woman so endlessly fascinating? I don’t want to live on a manor in semi-rural New York. I don’t need help identifying the right paint color or choosing the right length for my living room curtains. I’ve never once cooked a Martha Stewart recipe and thought, now that’s one I’ve got to make again. I do enjoy antiquing and dream of owning chickens, but that’s about where our similarities begin and end. So why can’t I stop thinking about that iceberg?
I grew up in a household where the name Martha Stewart was a jab, not a compliment. If my brother or I got an elaborately wrapped birthday gift, my mom would quip something to the effect of, “Her mom must think she’s Martha Stewart.” If someone brought a fussy dessert to an elementary school party, if someone paid undue attention to appearances — same response. When I was 15 or 16, I announced that I wanted to make a gourmet stuffing on Thanksgiving, with dried fruit and chestnuts and sausage. And, you guessed it: Who did I think I was, Martha Stewart?
In a 2006 Businessweek profile, a reinvented and reinvigorated post-prison Martha talked about her dream of becoming as enduring a name as Coco Chanel or Walt Disney. Almost 20 years later, she’s definitely gotten her wish. Martha Stewart is a spatula, a basket of hydrangeas, an empire. She is one of my mother’s slyest insults and, I assume, many other people’s highest compliment.
But she is also still a woman, with at least a little bit of mess lurking under that airbrushed veneer. And in the case of the iceberg (and the prison, and the unattainability), that’s the problem. In that 2006 story, Dennis B. McAlpine, a partner at an investment research firm and a frequent source of Martha commentary in the aughts, offered an assessment of her company’s strategy. In short, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia aimed to downplay the actual Martha and embrace the idea of her. “There's a move to make Martha Stewart more like Betty Crocker, more ephemeral,” McAlpine told Businessweek.
And therein lies the problem: Betty Crocker is a fictional character, invented by an ad man and based on his memories of a cook in a college cafeteria. Betty is three-dimensional only in the sense that her name graces millions of cardboard boxes of cake mix. She would never be caught dead in a low-cut white swimsuit. She certainly doesn’t own stock.
But Martha has a pulse. Martha posts on Instagram, and 4.1 million of us follow. I say “us” because I am among the masses. I admire Martha’s two-dimensional kitchen and the two-dimensional, well-lit food produced there — even if I’ve decided her recipes aren’t really for me. I aspire to wear linen as artfully as Martha does in my senior years. Sometimes I buy elaborate wrapping paper, and my pantry is stocked with edible flowers and rose petals for cake decorating. So maybe, yes, Martha — ephemeral internet Martha — is inspiring.
Maybe Martha Stewart was a person at a time when we wanted caricatures, when the monoculture still existed and one name could stand for an entire genre. These days, people talk at us from our phone screens, and sometimes the tableau is at least a fraction of a percent less perfect. It is not a stretch to think a fly has flown into a decorator’s house, that a dust bunny lurks under a favorite chef’s stove.There’s a chance to see the sloppy underbelly — sometimes, occasionally, in the proper doses. So maybe it was stupid for Martha to drink an iceberg. But maybe it’s okay — that it happened, that I sent so many texts about it, that this wealthy octogenarian grandmother does idiotic things sometimes. Martha, she messed up, and she’s one of us.
Bon Appetit put out a (beautifully designed) list of the 24 best new restaurants in America in 2023. The lone D.C. spot to make the list was Bar Spero, where I ate once and loved every bite. I walk by it at least once a week on my way to work and think about the grilled oysters drenched in beurre blanc every time.
Leave a comment if you’ve tried any of the other 23 spots. I’m already making a list to see which ones I can hit in the next year.