‘Martha Stewart Living’ will cease publication
My childhood Thanksgiving stuffing never involved bread. Instead, my mother would render the pancetta, cook some aromatics in the shiny fat, spritz it with Madeira wine, and toss those richly flavored ingredients with almonds, green grapes, and slivers of wild rice. Don’t knock it until you try – the recipe comes from Martha Stewart, after all, as it appeared in the November 1999 issue of her famous Martha Stewart alive.
Looking at its cover now, I see a flash of the Ikea wooden shelves in the first apartment my family had in the United States, and in the center, a row of Martha Stewart alive, filled with flags that marked everything my mother wanted to do. When the magazine published that particular Thanksgiving issue, my family had only been in the country for two years, and with no real attachment to American food traditions, we were free to do anything. Choosing wild rice over, say, Stove Top has become our annual tradition, grounding us in our new life. And as we acclimatized and assimilated, Martha Stewart alive the recipes remained a constant – the November 2001 Upside-Down Pear Cake and August 2002 Chocolate Caramel Pie served as centerpieces for special occasions or dessert offerings at potlucks.
I should know by now that it’s a lost game to still have affection for a print magazine. Last week, Dotdash Meredith, the media company that acquired the rights to Living in 2014 – announced that the May 2022 issue would be the magazine’s final print. (He still had 2 million subscribers last year, according to the Monks Register.) In place of print, the company will focus its attention on “growing the digital business” of MarthaStewart.com. This sort of thing happens often, as print magazines become more anachronistic than necessary in a faster-paced, screen-filled world. In an act that now seems to foreshadow, Dotdash Meredith, who also publishes Food & Wineremoved the print editions of six publications, including In the style and Eat well, earlier this year; this reduction eliminated about 200 jobs.
Launched by caterer-turned-tycoon Martha Stewart in 1990 as a quarterly magazine, Living became a monthly publication in 1994. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, the umbrella company Stewart established in 1997 to house her many brands, has played with other publications including everyday food and Martha Stewart’s Childrenbut only Living and Martha Stewart Weddings held firm, although the latter lost its print edition in 2018. The end of LivingThe raffle of won’t leave such a big hole in the world, I admit – it’s not like there’s a shortage of recipes or crafting or decorating inspiration online. But to me, it feels like one of the last remnants of an earlier era of lifestyle media, one that’s just moving ahead.
Now almost everyone wants to tell us how to live. What we should aspire to, according to almost every influencer niche, is unstable and fueled by microtrends. But before lifestyle influencers, there was Martha, and before Instagram feeds, there were magazines like Living to offer us both aspiration and inspiration. Unlike today’s influencer era, Stewart’s brand has always been relatively cohesive — rich, traditional, WASP-y — but within that consistency lies a sense of comfort.
For many people, like my family, the way of life described in LivingThe pages of (and frankly, the rest of Stewart’s brand) have always been ambitious – we’ll certainly never have a farmhouse in Connecticut, filled with grisaille murals in the lobby. But the little bits we could glean from her recipes or her advice provided the foundation for a new life, a life that was ultimately enriched with its own traditions and family favorites.
Separated from my mother’s old pile of magazines, I’ll head to Martha Stewart’s website – out of necessity – the next time I want to recreate one of these old favorites. But as useful as a website can be, I can be sure that I’ll never open one and find a piece of paper from 1999 full of drawings my mother made while online. a landline, and I’ll never see the places where, while helping to bake, my butter-covered fingers marked the page as I checked: how many egg yolks fit in that pie crust, again?
