‘Martha Stewart’s Hors d’Oeuvres Handbook’ Loves Its Tiny, Pretty Food

With 300 pages of recipes, Martha’s 1999 tour de force of party snacking is authoritative, maddening, and sometimes very useful

On Election Night, I stayed up late with my dog. We lay on the couch together. He napped. I tried to avoid checking the stupid New York Times needle every 10 seconds by reading scholarly articles about the meaning of Martha Stewart. The deadline for this piece was coming up. I had spent the past two weeks obsessively poring over Martha Stewart’s Hors d’Oeuvres Handbook and then shopping for expensive ingredients and assembling them into tea sandwiches and canapes and mini-quesadillas. The cost of imported ham and cheese and seafood made me nervous. And when I finished cooking, everything had tasted like crap, except for the very expensive lemon and crab tea sandwiches. The dough for the pain de mie stayed liquid, no matter how much extra flour I added, and resembled a cinder block when it came out of the oven. The ham and goat cheese sandwiches tasted like all goat cheese, no ham. The flour tortillas, the product of an entire afternoon of work, were simultaneously pasty and tough.

My election panic and deadline panic were starting to coalesce. Cookbook authors all have their own language, and, based on this and the results of my previous experience with Martha, I did not understand hers. I hoped I would find answers in American Studies and the Journal of Business Ethics.

I read reviews of the Hors d’Oeuvres Handbook that came out when the book was first published in 1999. Unlike the sneering contempt they had for earlier books like Entertaining and Martha Stewart’s Christmas, mocking Martha’s work as silly, overwrought, and unnecessary, critics this time showed a grudging respect. They praised the 200 pages of color photographs (by Dana Gallagher) that turned plates of endive boats and tuna rolls and frico tacos into still lifes worthy of a Dutch master, and the 300 pages of recipes (co-written with Susan Spungen) that followed. They confessed that they and their guests actually enjoyed the crispy asparagus straws and grape cups and stuffed cherry tomatoes. They had the blinding epiphany that Martha’s works were a guide that presented options, not a blueprint that had to be slavishly followed — even though Martha herself had been saying that for years. “We all hate to admit it,” wrote a reviewer for the Vancouver Sun, “but it’s a godsend for both the party paragon and the party doofus.”

Maybe this newfound respect had something to do with the impending initial public offering of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, which would make Stewart the first American self-made woman billionaire. It’s practically written into the Constitution that you have to give props to someone who has that much money, especially if they earned it. “This is a good book,” wrote a Chicago Tribune critic. “If you find yourself agreeing, don’t think of it as joining the cult of Martha. Just accept it as part of a plan for her complete takeover of our lives.”

In assessing Martha, the more philosophically inclined academics invoked Thorstein Veblen and Pierre Bourdieu, who, as I learned as a grad student, could, along with Foucault’s panopticon and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, be used to prop up any theory and make you sound smart. I read sentences like, “While MS food is ‘white,’ it is a class-specific whiteness that transcends ethnicity and becomes accessible by cultivation rather than heritage. As such, MS food is based upon an invented artisan ethos only fully realized by those who have the luxury to perform the work, lending itself to elaborate conspicuous consumption.” (Translation: Martha Stewart recipes are a rich person’s idea of “labor.”)

I learned that Martha Stewart was part of a long line of public homemakers who had no use for men, starting with the never-married Catharine Beecher in the 1840s. This list also included widowed Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book who single-handedly created the ideal American Thanksgiving based on nostalgia for a past that never was. I learned, via Joan Didion in the New Yorker, that turning one’s PTA prizewinning chili sauce or date bar recipe into a thriving business was a common fantasy among American women, one indulged by Didion herself: “I myself believed for most of my adult life that I could support myself and my family, in the catastrophic absence of all other income sources, by catering.” (This was also the plot of popular women’s movies of the ’30s and ’40s, most famously Imitation of Life.)

Entertaining is, for me, more of a source of anxiety than joy. I worry that no one will show up. I worry that there won’t be enough food or that no one will eat what I serve. Once, I helped throw a party that was an unqualified success. That was almost worse. At 3 a.m. my roommate and I sat on the couch, half-asleep, silently willing everyone to go home (especially the people we hadn’t invited) so we could go to bed. In retrospect, we should have listened to Martha, who advises that parties should have a limited time span.

The last time I hosted anything that could be called a “dinner party” was Thanksgiving 2016. My parents and I were bitterly divided over the election results, but we had decided that, despite everything, we were still a family. In order to prevent any (more) unpleasant discussions, I decided I would feed everyone continuously for three hours. We had pigs in puff pastry blankets, chips and salsa, roast turkey breast and gravy, roasted broccoli, and three kinds of pie (two for the humans, one for the dog), all homemade, except for the chips. I drew up a Martha-esque plan — shopping lists, schedules — for three days of shopping and cooking. It was tense and stressful. Afterward, we all agreed it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been, which isn’t much of an endorsement for a party, even if it involves family.

In theory, the Hors d’Oeuvres Handbook could provide sufficient ammunition for another holiday offensive this year. I’m sure if I practiced enough, I could manage a decent batch of flour tortillas, and now that I know better, I will make the effort to go to another grocery store that sells the right kind of chorizo for the chorizo and manchego cheese quesadillas. I could buy a mandoline to make perfectly see-through cucumber slices. I’m sure I would totally use it again! If I work hard enough, and pay enough attention and get every detail perfect, I could make a shithole into something beautiful, like that “Good Bones” poem people started passing around on social media the morning after the election.

While I theorized, I went back to the text. “For me,” Martha wrote in the introduction, “hors d’oeuvres are a chance for the host or hostess to show off skills in the creation of flavorful bite-sized jewels or other imaginative concoctions that can be served as simple accompaniments for a pre-dinner drink or as elaborately displayed and garnished ‘cocktail’ food. Hors d’oeuvres must be two things at once: delicious and attractive!”

The hors d’oeuvres I had made were neither. The closest I got were the tea sandwiches, but the sesame chicken salad sandwiches fell apart when I tried to cut off the crusts, and I ended up eating them deconstructed, with a fork. After six attempts, I had to acknowledge that Martha’s method of instruction did not work for me.

I mean, being two things at once is a lot to ask of anything, even a canape. Why was I expecting it to also soothe political divisions, to ease collective fear, to bring peace and harmony to the family dinner table? Anything good in this life requires hard work, right? Look at Martha. Look what she did, with her 20-hour workdays. She built a media empire in her own image. She rehabbed two old houses. She built a gorgeous garden. She still hobbles through it on her bad Achilles tendon, pruning every errant branch, restoring order.

Here’s an anecdote I heard from a friend who had a friend who once worked behind the scenes on one of Martha’s Christmas specials. (Yes, I know, such reliable sourcing. Bear with me, please.) They were filming the gingerbread house sequence. Martha was still fussing with the house when the director called cut and said it was time for a break. Everybody stopped, except for Martha. She continued to work on the gingerbread house until she was satisfied. There was no reason to do it. It wasn’t going to appear on camera. But it pleased her, like God making the universe.

And I think this is the thing about Martha and her hors d’oeuvres: Pleasing herself is the primary goal. It’s nice that they make her party guests happy, too — who among us doesn’t love an hors d’oeuvre or hasn’t, at a cocktail party, plotted out a spot near the kitchen to nab the best one as the catering staff brings out the trays? It’s especially nice, for her, that they have brought her a shit-ton of money.

Two nights after the election, I finally got around to Martha, the Netflix documentary. The parts about Martha’s insider trading trial were hard to watch, especially the absolute glee the world took in her very public downfall. If the Martha Stewart empire had really been about amassing power and influence, that would probably have been the end of all of it: the parties, the canapes, the gilded pine cones, Martha herself. And yet, in prison, one of the first things Martha did was find her way to the garden and teach one of her fellow inmates how to take care of it. This paved the path to her redemption as a human being, not as a warm-and-fuzzy philanthropist, but the sort of person who has zero fucks left to give. (I’m suspicious of the tidiness of this narrative, but it makes for a good movie.)

Yes, she’s still obsessive about her garden and her photoshoots and even the green cannabis-leaf cookies she makes for her good friend Snoop Dogg, and she still hates talking about her feelings, but she isn’t a CEO anymore and her whole life and identity don’t rest upon her public reputation. All these things she does, she does for herself.

It’s funny — by which I mean enraging — the tricky dance all these pre-Martha homemakers and Hors d’Oeuvres Handbook-era Martha did, pretending these things that pleased them were in service of humanity, to make it acceptable. It was a disguise for ambition, just like it was for the brilliant 19th-century women who, instead of contributing their hard-won professional expertise to the cause of women’s suffrage, had to share recipes.

So, fuck it. Make those beautiful and delicious hors d’oeuvres if you want to. Or don’t. Feeding the world isn’t going to save it. You can’t save a world that doesn’t want to be saved. Or even make it love you. But feeding yourself will keep you alive.

Aimee Levitt is a freelance writer in Chicago. Read more of her work at aimeelevitt.com.