Amanda Hesser shares her opinion on Martha Stewart’s documentary

Welcome to the latest edition of Food52 founder Amanda Hesser’s weekly newsletter. Hi, I’m Amanda.Packed with food, travel and shopping tips, Food52 activities, and other things that catch your attention. Get inspired: Sign up here for their emails.

I tend to have two cooking modes: either I get caught up in nostalgia and want to cook recipes I haven’t made in a long time, or I thirst for the new. Last week, I had Danielle Oron’s 2016 Salted Tahini Chocolate Chip Cookies, which technically weren’t that long ago, but somehow feel like a past life. I plan to keep them in my current life. Tahini, salt and chocolate work like magic together. The tahini forms the base of the cookie and there is enough flour to hold the dough together, making it a chewy, nutty cookie without the weight of one made with peanut butter. Or as Food52er member Aly S. commented: “A true paradise for geniuses. It tasted like the creamiest halva with chocolate in cookie form. To die for!

We’ll get to Martha in a second, but first, we have a lot going on at Food52!

Without a doubt, this is my favorite annual feature. We asked 52 ceramists to design a mug.just for us! Check them out here and hurry as they sell out fast. Believe me, I have learned this lesson the hard way!

Our newest show, “What’s For Fika,” launched with Nea’s (not anymore!) Swedish family secret recipe for traditional cardamom buns.

We’ve unearthed this roundup of creative and delicious Thanksgiving recipes for you. I’m definitely going to make the cranberry salsa macha again.

It took us years, but we finally found a fountain for a beautifully designed porcelain holiday village.

If you haven’t seen the Martha Stewart documentary on Netflix yet and have even the slightest interest in her, it’s a great use of two hours of your life. In two hours, Martha herself could plant white peonies where someone carelessly let red flowers (a forbidden color in Martha’s world) grow in her garden, reprimand an employee for using the wrong knife to cut an orange, and prepare a party for 20 people. guests.

Watching the movie was like reading your magazine, Martha Stewart livingin the past. It was always a delightful love/hate read. My mom, my sisters, and I would flip through each page, complain loudly about how disconnected she was, then silently imitate her centerpieces and cookie decorating and go buy towels from Kmart.

“I’m celebrating something that’s been left out for so long,” he said in the documentary. “I think I’m like the modern feminist.”

Unlike other magazines and homegrown books that talked down to their audiences by promoting content that was “easy,” Martha raised the bar and gave people something to aspire to. “They may never make that cake, but they can dream about it,” she said. saying.

This compulsive need for constant improvement extended during her time in prison, where she befriended an inmate who grew cucumbers in the prison garden. Naturally, he used them to make cucumber sandwiches for the women in his ward.

Martha’s hallmark is not so much perfection as her dogged pursuit of it. After filmmaker RJ Cutler released the documentary, he called the New York Timesand explained the topics of conversation which he had obtusely, she thought, omitted. “My magazine, my Martha Stewart magazine, which you could say is traditional, was the most modern home magazine ever created,” she told the magazine. Times. “We had cutting-edge photography. Nobody ever showed the puff pastry like I showed it. Or the glossaries of apples and chrysanthemums. And we were very proud of all that modernism. And he didn’t understand any of that.”

Cutler captured his impressive resilience, his sharp tongue (from his trial, “Those prosecutors should have been put in a Cuisinart and turned on”), but I agree he largely missed what his magazine added to the culture. Imagine The Last Dance without Michael Jordan’s moves on the court.

As her friend Lloyd Allen said: “She was the first woman to see the marketability of her personal life. “Martha was the first influencer.” If Merrill and I hadn’t grown up with Martha, would Food52 exist? Maybe not.

But don’t worry, I will never call you stupid for using the wrong tool in the kitchen. I do it all the time!

Have a great week!

amanda