Dear Martha

Dear Martha—

Why am I writing to you now after all these years? I guess it’s because I have been thinking about the women—and they are all women except Mario Batali, whom I will not mention here—whose voices I hear as I go about my domestic life. Domestic goddesses, I guess Nigella Lawson would call them, although she has only become part of my pantheon very recently. First, let me be clear: I don’t actually hear voices in my head, not really. I think, with the possible exception of you and Marcella Hazen (more on her later) I have a very healthy relationship with my idols. But, of course, the two of you came first, when I was very young and it was hard to say no to you. 

We met at a wedding in 1980 or 1981. Of course, you weren’t an actual guest: let’s say you were the presiding spirit on that occasion. I was in graduate school, just two years out of college, and this was my first friends’ wedding. Forty years later, I am still not a great wedding guest, but I do have your book on weddings and sometimes teach it in my “Marriage Inc” class, along with Chris Ingram’s critique of the wedding industrial complex, White Weddings. But I digress. Let’s put our feelings about weddings (and marriage) aside and talk about vegetables.

It was at Kirk and Debbie’s wedding that I first realized large, roundish vegetables—squash or cabbage for example—could be made into bowls and filled with dips, even if those dips did not contain any part of the original vegetable. This may seem like a small thing, even to you, Martha, but it changed my life a little bit—I will try not to exaggerate how much. Being a Victorianist, and some would say a little bit of a Victorian, I like things that look like other things, that blur the line, say, between human and animal, life and death—of course always in an adorable way. Think of the Victorian practice of decorative taxidermy and those stuffed cats under glass, arranged and dressed playfully as—to pick a random example—a wedding party. Thing of the dead cat groom, standing erect at the alar, waiting for his dead/stuffed/cat bride who you (I mean me) could swear was blushing.

I will have to drag myself back to vegetables again, although we can stay, of course, in the nuptial idiom. Before that wedding I attended in the 1980s I had always had what I thought of as a tacky preference for bowls that looked like food—think Majolica, as I am sure you, Martha, are doing if you have read this far. After the wedding I realized that the bowl/food relationship could work the other way—and for far less money. Cabbage as a bowl was affordable for a graduate student in the way a giant majolica platter shaped like a bunch of asparagus is not. Unfortunately, perhaps partly because of an article you wrote on majolica in the 1990’s, I still can’t really afford it, except the really badly made kind that may technically not be majolica after all. It matters, when you encrust a platter with so many giant shrimp that you cannot fit any real shrimp on it, that the illusion be complete, the details of the claws and antennae perfect. Otherwise, some might say there will be no shrimp on the platter at all.

Even though your article on majolica probably made it unaffordable, even though the price has gone up with my salary, I really like what you wrote. I kept the issue of Martha Stewart Living in which it appeared until Hurricane Harvey destroyed the two lower shelves of my cookbook case, where the magazines were and also the cookbooks whose national provenance began after the letter “M.” You will be happy to know, Martha (the casualness is entirely affected), that your cookbooks floated above the floodwaters because I had filed them under “A”—not for “American,” because I really don’t know what that means, but “Appetizers.”

Let’s talk appetizers, Martha, because that’s where you and I shine together. While the first book of yours that I bought, Entertaining, is beautiful, I admit I used it mostly to look at. It’s a coffee table book, or soft food porn, not really a cookbook. And honestly—please forgive my disrespect—your recipes are not always that great. They generally require a lot of unnecessary work for a somewhat anticlimactic payoff. Of course, I make an exception for the recipes in Hors d’Oeuvres Handbook—where fussiness is the point. Or perhaps the point is size: under your guidance I have made crab cakes the size of my thumbnail and empanadas that would be invisible if they were not so very cute. If I have to roll something into a blossom, or wrap something improbably in something else, I go to you. I guess its part of the old story: your magic is making food into things and things into food. Thank you.

Maybe I am writing to you instead of Marcella because you came first in the pantheon. And besides, when I hear Marcella’s voice she is always yelling at me. Sometimes the yelling is inspirational (Never use only parmesan in pesto! Lasagne noodles that are not hand-rolled are not worth attempting! Note that I spelled “lasagna” correctly! Are you impressed?) Sometimes her voice is paralyzing, as when she recommends an ingredient—a sweet squash or a tiny shrimp—that can be found only in (a specific part of) Italy. She mellowed in later years, I think, especially after she discovered butternut squash. But I still wince almost every time I use my garbage disposal (Don’t mix garbage and food!). Although you have high standards, Martha—some might suggest too high—and although it is literally impossible for anyone without enormous amounts of money, time, and extra labor power to do almost anything you do, you never say never. You pretend that everything is possible in an ordinary house, with a job, and children, and a mortal body.

Maybe I am writing to you instead of Marcella, or Madhur Jaffrey, or my new goddesses, Donna Hay and Edna Lewis, because they stay, as it were, in the kitchen. You have taken over—I have given you the freedom of—my whole house. Your ubiquity is part of what makes our relationship so troubling, Martha. I am at my best in the kitchen. I am also okay (this is a cheering thought) in the dining room and the pantry. Martha, I have a pantry now, and all my flours --glutinous and gluten-free--have been decanted into (almost) matching mason jars. I also have what I believe is called a butler’s pantry, just like you do in all of your homes. Before the pandemic my butler’s pantry had orchids on the window sill and a variety of lovely (non-majolica) pitchers and platters. Now it has dog food and wine and the orchids are dead.

I guess you just take up more room(s) in my mind, Martha. I am sorry to bring this up, but when you went to prison I thought of you a lot. The day you actually started your sentence, I redid my napkin storage in your honor. I found some baskets, and might also have bought some, and sorted the napkins by color and then arranged the colors according to the spectrum of visible light. When you got out of prison, I sorted them again because, over time, while you were doing time, the napkins got kind of wrinkled and fell out of their rainbow. If I were really to have honored your spirit I probably should have redone the baskets more often. Five months is, after all, a long time for napkins (surprisingly susceptible to entropy) and for celebrity prisoners. 

Have you read Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Martha? If you have, you may or may not remember Esther, the heroine’s aunt, who serves a month-long imprisonment for prostitution. For ten chapters, when Esther is incarcerated, the novel seems to forget about her. Many things happen to the other characters when she is in prison: careers take off, marriages are proposed and rejected, people repent their choices, change their minds, become radicalized, advance in class, travel to faraway places. All this in one month, Martha, and you were incarcerated for five. The point is that no one thinks about Esther while she sits in her jail cell. I try to tell my students that multi-plot novels require us to think about all the characters, even those who are off stage or behind bars. 

It wasn’t as easy to remember you in prison as I thought it might be. I had your books, of course, and sometimes your name was mentioned in the news or in jokes, usually abut decorating your cell. I am not, to this day, sure what you did in jail, Martha. Esther picked oakum, which seems a little bit too much like the thankless and pointless tasks you sometimes (sorry!) suggest for your readers. Picking oakum, as I am sure you know, involves unpicking rope to make other rope. It’s boring and it hurts your fingers. When I thought about your arrest and conviction, Martha, I was of two minds.  I feel that you were singled out for punishment, when other insider traders—almost all men—were not.  If you did commit a crime, if you did deserve punishment, it is for something else—perhaps for being a domestic goddess, for shaming women into domesticity, for providing a standard that people without your resources can never achieve. I guess your sin—if you have committed one—is being complicit promoting what Victorianists have come to call the domestic carceral. Homes can be prisons, Martha. Knowing this has stopped me from folding napkins in your name, or making half-inch blinis.

I need to think bigger now that I am getting close to the end of this letter. Who are you to me, Martha? What is our relationship? Of course, it is an unequal one: you don’t know me as I know you. I am not in your kitchen(s), your greenhouse(s), your garden(s). You are, to quote Elton John (who has perhaps been in your garden(s)) “older than me,” although you would never know it from looking at your face, which is still pink and luminous and uncracked. You have not aged, while I have grown older. It is hard for me to think of you as senior to me, even though I have often turned to you for advice. Are you an older sister, a fun(?) aunt, a teacher? 

I have never liked family metaphors very much. It is easier for me if I think of you as a Victorian author—Dickens for example, or George Eliot—who are always the same age for me, despite the piling up of time and even anniversaries of their birth and death. They have died without aging, and perhaps you will too. Like Dickens and Eliot, you are a spinner of fictions. You are not as smart as Eliot of course; I don’t think you would have that much in common. Dickens, though, with his domestically incarcerated heroines? I see something there, Martha. Dickens is sometimes in my head too, although I have never folded napkins for him.

Do I want to be (more) like you, Martha? No more than I want to be more like Dickens or even Eliot. I read a novel long ago, about an English professor who, when thinking about her love life asked herself what George Eliot would have done. I would not go to Eliot for advice, Martha, although I might go to the Eliot narrator, who is, oddly, infinitely wiser than the biographical Eliot. That’s what you are, Martha, to me: not a person exactly, and not an author, but a narrator, a persona made out of writing and images. There are hints, Martha, that you are not such a good person to your staff and to the real people in your life. That doesn’t matter, any more than it matters to me that the real-life George Eliot was kind of dismissive of other women. I am very fond of you as a narrator, Martha—or should I say “Martha?” The person who talks in my head is not you, but someone I have helped to construct, as surely and perhaps imprecisely as I have constructed the appetizers you have imagined for me and that I have made my own.

I am not sure how to sign this. “Sincerely” doesn’t seem right, and neither (quite) does “love”. “Fondly” would do perhaps, but let me be inspired by Dickens here since I have used his name in passing. As he would say,

Faithfully,

Helena