Martha Stewart Reveals Her Lowbrow Food Guilty Pleasure That She Steals From Her Housekeeper

Martha Stewart is wealthy enough to afford the most expensive food delicacies in the world, but the lifestyle guru keeps it real—and cheap!—when it comes to her food-themed guilty pleasures. In an interview with Town & Country, Stewart dished on her surprisingly simple go-to snacks that don’t seem to line up with the complicated recipes full of pricey ingredients she shares in her cookbooks, magazine, TV show, and website.

Martha Stewart has published a whopping 80 cookbooks and helms a high-end meal kit company, but that doesn’t mean she’s above the sneaky late night snack that’s maybe not so healthy. When asked about her favorite “guilty pleasure” foods, Martha’s answer was a bit surprising.

“It’s a spoon of really good organic peanut butter, or a slice of American cheese from my housekeeper’s drawer,” Martha told Town & Country.

“I steal American slices sometimes—in the plastic, it’s so horrible. But it’s such a good snack.”

Martha’s other late-night favorite is even more unusual.

“I eat pickled herring as a late-night snack before I go to bed because it’s savory and good,” Stewart told the magazine.

“I like liverwurst, and I know how bad it is now. I love squeezing it out of the tube and just eating calves’ liverwurst.”

Stewart, who has shared recipes for fancy foods like date truffles, curried swordfish stew, and fresh ricotta with rhubarb compote on her PBS series Martha Stewart’s Cooking School told Town & Country that her not-so-fancy food finds started at a young age when she was growing up in Nutley, New Jersey.

“At my friend’s house growing up they had white bread, which was so delicious, and we’d slather that with “sandwich spread”—mayonnaise with relish in it,” Stewart revealed.

A young Martha even got around her mother, Martha Kostyra’s, soda ban by indulging in the banned beverage when she was at a friend’s house.

“We weren’t allowed to have soda in my house, but my friend Peggy’s father worked for Coca-Cola, so we would sneak over to her house and have a glass full of ice with Coca-Cola and a big, big swirl of Reddi-wip on top,” Martha said. “We called it our Coke float. It was so great.”

This isn’t the first time Martha Stewart has talked about her favorite foods that would never make it into her cookbooks. In an earlier interview with Bon Appetit, Stewart revealed that sometimes after a long day she’ll eat a late night hotdog.

“After a long day with no dinner, sometimes I have to stop and get a hot dog,” Stewart told Bon Appétit.

“If I’m coming home from work at 11 o’clock at night, one of my drivers will bring us to Papaya King on the Upper East Side. That’s an evil thing I do.”

Martha, who likes to order two to-go hotdogs with sauerkraut and mustard, told the gourmet foodie magazine that she has been a hot dog lover ever since her childhood because her supersized clan was “too poor to go out and rarely went to restaurants.” Martha’s family sometimes splurged on hot fudge sundaes at an ice cream parlor, and if she saved up her babysitting money she could afford a hotdog at a place in nearby Clifton, New Jersey.

“Rutt’s Hut [was a place we’d go,” Stewart revealed. “It was a hotdog place, and was probably a precursor to McDonald’s. “They do all kinds of versions of hotdogs now, but they used to just use mustard, relish, ketchup, and sauerkraut. That was a nice place to eat together as a family.”

These days, Martha considers herself a cocktail whiz—”I make the best bourbon sour, the best margaritas, really good saketinis, and kir royales,” she told Town & Country—and she’s a master at gourmet cooking, but she draws the line at one summertime staple.

“I’m not a huge aficionado of grilling because I don’t like smelling like smoke after grilling,” Stewart revealed. “I have to go take a bath.”

[Featured Image by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for New York Times]