Welcome to the free issue of Between the Layers: A conversation about life through the lens of cooking and baking. For more great content and recipes, consider becoming a paid subscriber! I Miss Martha StewartLove or hate her, Martha is a style icon & I baked her clafouti with spring blueberries and it was wonderful - No. 53
In February I paid $85 to hear Martha Stewart talk about restoring her nearly 160-acre, circa 1776 farm in Bedford, New York. I was one of 2,000 at the Antiques & Garden Show in Nashville, and honestly, I don’t think most people in the room came here for the farm. They wanted to see Martha—the authority on style and author of 95 books about it—in the flesh. They wanted to see how the woman who created their favorite cake stand, Egyptian cotton bed sheets, frozen mac and cheese, and now, chardonnay, looks at 80. (She looks fabulous, by the way.) Me? I wanted to see her farm. Martha lives on Cantitoe Farm, in Westchester County horse country, where even the vegetables seem privileged. Their soil has been amended with rich Vermont compost. And here heirloom roses—those plump David Austin roses in warm peach and blushy pink, roses you’d expect from someone who wrote a book on Weddings—flourish. Here on Martha’s farm, 240 apple and pear trees hide a fence around a swimming pool that her daughter said she didn’t need in the first place.
Martha’s pretty mad about trees. A 500-year-old grand white oak called the Bedford Oak is nearby and so revered that locals remove their caps when they pass it. Martha boasts that her farm’s former owner, Ruth Sharp, saved the legendary tree from a developer’s bulldozer in 1977. And she says she’s planted 13,000 trees in the dozen or so years since she’s been here. Everything’s rounded up on Martha’s farm. She’s planted 2,000 boxwoods, 400 azaleas, and her farmhands harvest 3,000 bales of hay for the horses each year. Back When Style Was About Poaching FruitWhen Martha’s first book, Entertaining, was published in 1982, a tidal wave of pressed napkins, poached pears, and front door wreaths swept across America. And they weren’t delivered from Amazon. You made them. I grew up craftsy like Martha and remember my mother’s dried flowers in our attic and how she sewed our dolls’ clothes. To me, reading Martha’s books wasn’t as much stressful (that’s how my friends found her) as it was chock full of ideas. I, too, had learned to sew by cutting fabric on the kitchen table.
When I read Martha, though, I studied the photographs. How she set the scene in this fairytale farmhouse I yearned to call my own. The food on the table and the recipes that accompanied it were secondary. She told me the right way to force bulbs so I’d have amaryllis in bloom by Christmas and how to save seeds from one summer garden to the next. And I would grow herbs as she did and in later years take my young daughters with me to Nashville gardens to amass enough volunteer hours to join the local herb society full of lovely ladies just like Martha, except nicer. Martha was a bit aloof in those days, but I never thought it was more than her stern upbringing and work ethic. In the kitchen, I did make her royal icing to spread onto sugar cookies, and I think that’s the best recipe if you want to stack cookies because the icing hardens beautifully. But honestly, after three children, I didn’t have much time for Martha projects. Or her perfectionism. They just didn’t sit well in my world of laundry, carpools, and sippy cups. And I felt that she had already covered the really great ideas. I was growing cynical.
And when she was sent to prison for lying about a stock trade, I sensed she would become the woman the world wanted to hate. She shouldn’t have lied, yes, but I found myself defensive of her as if she were an old friend. How many others had clearly done the same thing and never been punished? But post prison, in five months time plus house arrest, Martha more than survived. One thing she has always gotten right is to surround herself with talented people, the people who cook the food, style the photos, take the pictures, write the blogs, farm the land, feed the animals, wash the horse blankets, plant, till, do everything, so she can put her stamp on it and make money.
Martha and I had first met in 1984 or ‘85 at a Junior League show in Nashville. We were both on the program—she the keynote (of course) and I was signing cookbooks at a booth. And then we met again in 2017 at the South Beach Food & Wine Festival in Miami when I baked cakes for Trisha Yearwood’s brunch and she and Snoop Dogg made their first big public appearance together on the beach stage. Let’s just say, Martha is more late-night than morning TV these days. Full disclosure, I thought about writing this piece a few weeks after Martha’s talk, but I couldn’t do it.The war in Ukraine had broken out, and Martha didn’t seem relevant considering what was happening in the world. What is it about her that I couldn’t stomach? Elitism? And I was worried you couldn’t either. So I held off writing until now. As my grandmother used to say, take a breath and think about it.
Beauty and Style in Today’s WorldMartha and I agree on a few things. She doesn’t like curtains. And I have big windows in my old house and hate to cover them up and obstruct the view. Martha’s got miles of gravel driveways, and while mine is a lot shorter, I am no match for Martha who keeps hers pristine by attaching rakes to the back of a tractor and as the tractor moves, the rocks smooth out. (Such a great idea!) We both favor cloth napkins. A paper napkin? “I don’t like the way it feels on my mouth,” she says. Martha loves birds. A fabulous bird room houses her canaries, and she has a “multinational geese collection” including some from France and China. She has pigeons and a peacock and 50 breeds of chickens with their own Buddhist Sherpa to care for them. I could not make this up if I tried. Listening to Martha rattle on about her animals veers on comedy. My friend Beth leans in and whispers, “Does she have elephants and giraffes, too?” As her talk ends, Beth mutters, “She was fabulous.” And she was. Martha has such great ideas. She knew the crowd would lap up her slides like French bulldogs waiting for their treats. I couldn’t forget the photo of her kitchen and the grand Italian cappuccino machine sitting on the white marble counter. She says it feeds her coffee obsession. On open shelves above it were neat stacks of white cups resting on matching saucers. I don’t even drink coffee, and I have no desire for that behemoth of a coffee maker, but how stylish was it to place those cups right on their saucers? I rushed out to search the booths at the show for some new/old cups and saucers. And when I arrived home and glanced at the battered but well-loved coffee mugs I sip tea from each morning, the ones I was about to replace, I felt a wee bit guilty and wondered if Martha has trouble parting with things. Once they’re chipped and stained, does she send them to Goodwill or just chuck them into the trash?
Then I stacked seven second-hand English cups and saucers on the shelf within easy reach and put the kettle on to boil. Few of us will ever be able to restore a centuries-old farm in the New York countryside, but we can spruce things up and with Martha’s help make our spaces more inviting. And I don’t care about her new wine that’s called Martha’s Chard. I’m sure it would give me a headache. I really want the old Martha back. The one who could walk you through the steps of making a front door wreath of pine cones on the morning show. The one on the cover of that Entertaining book who hadn’t made her millions yet and knew what it was like to scrimp and save and invite the neighbors over for dinner. I’ll bet that Martha would be even more relevant today. What do you love/hate about Martha?
Making Clafouti Better Than Martha, Sorry…From Martha’s latest book called Martha Stewart’s Fruit Desserts, is my riff on her Nectarine Clafouti. This is a fruit flan made famous in the Limousin region of south-central France where they’re known for their cherries. So it’s this eggy dessert that’s all about the cherries, or in this case, the fat local blueberries that looked as big as cherries once they baked. I added a step at the end of Martha’s recipe, one that will burst berries and give you a whole lot more flavor. I placed the nearly done clafouti under the broiler until it deeply browned and some of those blueberries popped. Then I showered it with powdered sugar. One lucky paid subscriber will win this book in the cookbook giveaway at the end of this month! Martha’s Clafouti (Clafoutis) with BlueberriesI had a really hard time picking one recipe to bake from Martha’s cookbook and settled on clafouti, an easy dessert you whip up in the food processor or blender with just about any fresh fruit of the season. I substituted blueberries for her nectarines because I had them in the fridge! And I saved you a step of having to scald the nectarines and peel and slice them, too! Notice my recipe has been adapted a bit from hers, and you can absolutely use grated lemon zest instead of the vanilla. Martha uses the whole vanilla bean, split and seeds scraped, of course! And she suggests you serve this warm. I’m surprised she didn’t use crabapples in any recipes in this book, what with making crabapple jelly from the fruit dropped in the West Virginia prison yard, right? If I had been her editor, I would have insisted on a crabapple crostata! Makes 6 to 8 servings 1 cup whole milk 1 cup heavy cream 4 large eggs 2 large egg yolks 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1/4 cup granulated sugar 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, at room temperature 2 cups fresh blueberries, rinsed and drained Confectioners’ sugar, for sprinkling
Coming in a couple days…Subscriber Thursday!The 5 Questions I Wanted to Ask Martha but Didn’t. Actually, I did. I sent them to her publicists but received no reply. And those Mother’s Day ideas I promised you. It’s a spring jumble of goodies. And I might toss in a favorite recipe, too. Have a great week! Anne
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