Meghan Gurdon on Martha Stewart’s real crimes:
“In this Ziploc bag, Ladies and Gentlemen, are veal bones. They have been roasted for two hours at a low heat, cracked with a mallet and simmered for another hour in a tender jus of thyme, shallot, butter, white wine, water, with just a touch of sea salt. These bones, and the fragrant liquid they yielded, are, I need hardly spell out, an affront to every American woman who has ever peeled a small, hard stock cube out of its silver wrapping and thrown it into the risotto hoping that somehow it will give the dish an Italianate flavor.
“Ladies, I know. Until Martha Stewart erupted on the national scene some 20 years ago, would any of you have felt bad about using stock cubes? Would you have apologized to your guests, and felt compelled to say, with a little shrug, ‘Well, it’s not how Martha Stewart would have done it, but . . .’ Would you? No, you would not. Without Miss Gracious-Living-Guru-Stewart to make you feel inadequate, you would have fed your guests risotto flavored with prefabricated, mass-marketed, cow-spine-derived, MSG-laden stock cubes and, members of the Jury, they would have been happy to eat it! Yeeeaaargh!
And stayed tuned today to find out from Meghan what Phoebe did this week, and why Proust doesn’t approve.