Old Money details the specifics of this anti-middle class counter-mythology extensively enough, but I can’t resist adding another particular here. I thought of it while reading a brilliant article by Margaret Talbot in a recent issue of The New Republic. It was a compare-and-contrast essay on the subtler messages delivered by Julia Child and by Martha Stewart, Child’s successor as cooking tutor to the upwardly mobile. Talbot does the unthinkable in American journalism and attributes their stylistic differences, most invidiously, to their different class origins. She sees Stewart as a classic self-made woman who is endlessly anxious about making a perfect impression, not only on her servant-blessed Old Money predecessors in the domesticarts, but on her servantless New Money followers. Child, on the other hand, is a classic (Boston) aristocrat: gawky but at ease, with a warbling voice, and a bemused, gently ironic manner. Stewart’s message to her students is that things must be done right with “right” defined as looking beautiful and, most important, as proclaiming the enormous amount of “taste” and hard work that went into them.

Critics berate Stewart for her perfectionist expectations of ordinary housemakers, but they miss the point. In an update of Veblen’s “instinct of craftsmanship,” she is modeling the workstyle expectations of the new, lean and mean corporation: expectations of ever-higher productivity, ever more perfect goods and services, all yielding an ever more “competitive” bottom-line result.

Over against this grim and anxious vision of what cooking and social life are supposed to mean, Julia Child offers a much more relaxed, sensual and considerate view—one that Talbot (rightly, I think) calls aristocratic. She notes that Childs is almost cavalierly amused at her mistakes, and almost hedonistically delighted at her successes—not just (or at all) for the impression they will make on her family and guests, but for the fun of it, the fun of doing it and eating it. What impresses me as aristocratic, though, is how refreshingly antithetical Child’s example is to today’s fierce corporate obsession with results, and to its claims of perfectionism.

Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. in his introduction to Old Money, 1996.