Hate-Watching TV's Domestic Divas

It is the time of year for hunkering down. As usual, I find myself pondering just how to hunker through the next several weeks until crocuses emerge, spirits improve, and Joe and I take off for warmer climes. I am coming up with the usual escapes: books, movies, and cooking. Cooking shows, to be more precise.

For inspiration and instruction, like the millions of other Americans who have made them rich and full of themselves, I turn to our culture’s dueling divas of domesticity. 

As lifestyle gurus, Martha Stewart and Ina Garten are polar opposites. 

Everyone knows that Martha is a rigid, humorless perfectionist and businesswoman.

Ina Garten has a grating nervous laugh. Slack, verbally repetitive, and annoying in her omnipresent blue chambray shirt, she took her schtick to The Today Show this past holiday season, showing NBC’s Savannah Guthrie how to style potato chips in a bowl and recommending that viewers doctor a Trader Joe’s apple tart it to make it seem like homemade. 

That last move was a page right out of my mother’s book and should disqualify Garten from ever giving cooking lessons again. Say what you want about Martha, she is not lazy and would never settle for potato chips in a bowl.

The extent to which I hate-watch both “The Barefoot Contessa” and Martha’s perfectionistic videos on social media exceeds my capacity to reproduce their recipes. Just watching has become the point. I loathe them but I can’t quit them. 

I have encountered Martha Stewart in person on two or three occasions. The first time was in the green room of The Today Show when she had a hissy fit because her assistant provided pink as opposed to red cellophane for a Valentine’s Day cooking segment. 

My second interaction, years later, was when she visited Cleveland Botanical Garden during the holidays to promote her syndicated TV show to local ABC advertisers. You would think that someone with domesticity as her subject matter could muster some warmth, but her aloof condescension chilled me. She had seen better than our staff’s local-yokel holiday display, damning it with the faintest of praise. 

I still prefer Stewart’s brand of dispensing robotic, clinical advice over Garten’s forced fun and fake laugh. Unlike Ina, who seems content with being the Hamptons’ zaftig queen mother, Martha was never going to settle for anything less than world domination, lending her name to CBD products, a wine she sells with Snoop Dog, and a bogus restaurant. I wonder what her brand will become when she’s no longer around to promote it. 

Like the brainwashed protagonist in A Clockwork Orange, I’ll just have to keep watching in order to find out.