Ray Versus Stewart: The K.O.

Rachel Ray is an Upstate New York success story.  With ambition and spunk, she took an ordinary career in food service, got herself a cooking segment on the news on WRGB-TV in Albany and took off.  Several shows on the Food Network and umpteen million cookbooks later, Ray is a household name.

My daughter Natalie loves Rachel Ray’s recipes, and that tells you where Ray is headed; years of success still to come.  Anyone who captures the under 25 market has a cool factor more useful than jet propulsion.  She has a daytime talk show, cookware, a new cookbook, Emmy Awards, a magazine, a  loyal following and a jealous Martha Stewart.  What’s that you say?  A jealous Martha Stewart?

In an interview for Nightline this week, Stewart had this to say about Rachel Ray:

“Well, to me, she professed that she could — cannot bake. She — just did a new cookbook which is just a re-edit of a lot of her old recipes. She — and that’s not good enough for me.”

Maybe not Martha, but its good enough for all the home cooks out there who were in need of recipes while you were serving time in the slammer as a convicted felon for profiting from a stock sale with inside information.   And it was good enough for you when you appeared on Ray’s talk show just hours before you opened your mouth.

Say what you want about Martha Stewart being a domestic diva, the queen of homemaking.  She’s also a megalomaniac who seems to have squandered a brilliant opportunity. Setbacks like imprisonment have a way of knocking some humility in a person but Stewart told interviewer Cynthia McFadden, why should she be angry with herself for what happened to her?  “There are so many others to be angry with”.  In the words of my children, what a bee-atch.

When asked for reaction to Stewart’s comments, Ray said this:

She does have a better skill set than I do when it comes to producing a beautiful, perfect, high-quality meal. I’d rather eat Martha’s than mine, too.”

You go!  Deflate the old wind bag!  Ray didn’t just stay out of the mud fight; she didn’t do what most people say when they’re publicly dissed, like “I’m disappointed to hear that because I’ve always thought the world of Martha”.

Ray brought her to the mat by agreeing with her!  If you didn’t love her before, which I didn’t, you have to now, which I do.  What’s Martha going to say now?   “I wish I could have made tens of millions of dollars too by rehashing old recipes but instead I’m getting up before dawn to feed organic cornmeal to my chickens so they yield eggs with yolks in such brilliant orange you can boost the color of your pumpkin pie with them, the pie with confectioners sugar in a pattern so delicate I had to travel to Portugal just to select just the right sample of antique lace to die cut from velum which I keep in tidy storage alongside the vintage silk ribbon that was woven and dyed for me by Carmen of Queens who’s been doing this the same way as generations of his family before him and I’m so fortunate to be given this demonstration and I manage all this by getting only three hours of sleep per night because who has time to sleep?  Or get sick even?

Yes,  Stewart told Cynthia McFadden that she exercises so vigorously because she has no time to be sick, implying the rest of us slugs have all the time in the world to be sick because we’re just passing time sending out resumes and figuring out how to pay the rent which isn’t nearly as interesting or important as creating Christmas cards out of paper pressed from the bark of trees and dyed with late-harvest blueberries left over from our day of canning.

We haven’t heard much from Martha since she got out of prison.  She’s busy trying to resurrect her company and her image.   Even if she created an original recipe of sour grapes and arrogance blended in a Magic Bullet, I think it’s too late for Martha.  Society is moving past her, as tired of her time-consuming precision schtick as they are of $600.00 cashmere leggings and $450.00 designer beach towels.   Who has time to make everything perfect and pretty when they have a pre-existing medical condition and can’t find anyone to give them health insurance?

Stewart says her imprisonment and the recession have cost her in excess of one billion dollars.  One billion.  I suspect while Stewart’s bank account has dwindled, Rachel Ray’s has managed to grow, even though Ray is dealing with a recession too.

I have new appreciation for Rachel Ray this week.  Maybe I’ll even go out and buy her new cookbook.   So what she “re-edit” her old recipes?  Don’t we all?  Now there’s someone with whom I can identify.

Tagged as: domestic diva, Martha Stewart, Rachel Ray