Martha Stewart understands the importance of proper flatware.
Nearly 50 years ago, Ms. Stewart began hosting elaborate dinners at her home on Riverside Drive in Manhattan for friends on Friday and Saturday nights. When the number of guests exceeded her own silverware set of 12, she would take a bus back to her childhood home in New Jersey to borrow her mother’s cutlery for that night’s dinner party.
While her guests were attending to enjoy the company, they were there, more importantly, for the food whipped up by the self-taught chef.
“It was so much fun serving those delicious things and realizing you could make your own French bread, you could make your own croissant,” Ms. Stewart reminisced on Sunday morning. “My daughter still says my croissants were the best croissants she’s ever had.”
“Oh, I’ve never had one ...” her longtime friend, New York Times food critic Florence Fabricant, trailed off, fishing for a dinner invitation, as Ms. Stewart laughed and acknowledged the chuckles emanating from the audience—wide-eyed, novice entertainers—who were spending their morning at Guild Hall in East Hampton listening to Ms. Stewart rain culinary wisdom upon them.
For about two hours, Ms. Fabricant and “America’s best-known hostess”—both East Hampton locals—chatted about a number of different topics, including entertaining, recipes and dietary preferences, during Guild Hall’s most recent installment of the “Conversations with Culinary Celebrities” series, wrapping up on Sunday, August 31, with chef and restaurateur Daniel Boulud.
“We love the series,” Jennifer Brondo, general manager of Guild Hall, said during a telephone interview prior to the event. “We’re excited that it’s one of the things that we can keep really affordable for the community—it’s $15.”
The packed audience got its money’s worth, listening in on the witty reminiscences between the friends, who first met professionally, when Ms. Fabricant featured Ms. Stewart in her columns, dating back to 1977. Ms. Stewart recalled how she moved from working as a Wall Street stockbroker, eating at the most luxurious French restaurants that Manhattan could offer her clients, to building up her own recipe repertoire.
She described her self-taught method like a screenplay.
“You know, in the movie ‘Julie & Julia’?” she said, referencing the 2009 film starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams that intertwined Julia Child’s culinary story with blogger Julie Powell’s 2002 challenge to cook all the recipes in Ms. Child’s first book. “Well, I was the original, because I really did cook every single recipe in that book. Cover to cover.”
She learned the difference between Swiss meringue frosting, Swiss buttercream and Italian meringue buttercream. She tasted bread with Ms. Child’s wisdom echoing in her mind: “Does it have that little bit of salt that it needs?”
“Julia was my silent mentor in the pages of the book, until I finally got to know her,” Ms. Stewart said of Ms. Child, whom she met later on in her career and collaborated with on several projects. “And then she wasn’t so silent.”
Other than having enough flatware on hand, Ms. Stewart has also learned other valuable lessons over the years, among them, ignore dietary restrictions.
“One night I had a pescetarian, we had a vegetarian, we had a non-dairy person and we had a non-sugar person. There’s so many rules and different diets. It just drives me crazy,” she said. “Now, I’ve taken it upon myself never to ask and I tell my assistants not to ask anymore. I always have something like an omelet if they’re too fussy.”
The theater roared with laughter and applause.
Ms. Stewart, a household name for many years, created a brand of domestic living. And despite a very public fraud conviction in 2004 and subsequent jail sentence, Ms. Stewart is bigger than ever—worth an estimated $638 million, according to Forbes—and it comes at a price: a severe lack of sleep and a packed day-to-day schedule. “It’s horrifying what I have to do in a day,” she joked.
After an in-depth conversation about Ms. Stewart’s various new projects, including her struggle on whether to turn a field on her upstate property into a vineyard or a dairy farm to make artisan cheese—she did not leave any closer to a decision—Ms. Fabricant invited the audience to take a turn at asking the questions.
Seth Raphaeli, owner of Studmuffin Desserts NYC, asked the star, “Whom would you say is the greatest influence on your life?”
“It’s not one person,” Ms. Stewart replied. “I rely on the people around me that talk, discuss, mull over a problem or challenge or solution. My business is really my entire life, so I’d have to say the people I work with are most influential.”
She then heard her own accolades when the audience was invited to hop up on stage for the last portion of the event: the book signing. Wearing their Sunday best, fans clutched copies of Ms. Stewart’s lifestyle guides and cookbooks, eagerly waiting for their chance with the celebrity chef.
“We found a morning for this works because people roll out of bed, they come here and they go to lunch,” Ms. Brondo said. “They’re hungry after they hear the chef talking for an hour.”
Undoubtedly, when the theater cleared, many of Ms. Stewart’s fans were headed for their kitchens.
The final “Conversations with Culinary Celebrities” featuring an interview with chef Daniel Boulud by host Florence Fabricant will be held on Sunday, August 31, at 11 a.m. at Guild Hall in East Hampton. Tickets are $15, or $13 for members. A VIP reception and meet-and-greet continental brunch with Mr. Boulud will precede the talk at 10 a.m. Tickets are $75. For more information, call 324-4050, or visit guildhall.org.