Susan Spungen

JZ

Can you tell me a bit about where you are in the process of your new book? Who is your publisher?

SS

Rodale. My agent initially got a lot of, “we love the proposal, but we’re not doing any more baking books.” But I think everyone has been looking for cookie books. I’m coming to the end of recipe development, but then I have to start dealing with the whole manuscript, and the essays. But I also have a pretty extensive proposal, so it’s very outlined already.

JZ

How did you land on cookies as the central theme?

SS

I’ve always specialized in cookies; cookie baking is something that I’ve always loved to do, and I think for me, it’s a bit of an art form. I don’t even know if you know this, but I studied fine art, and it was something that became a creative outlet. It’s a three-dimensional piece of edible art. So this book was something that I always wanted to do, and recipes like these have figured prominently in certain periods of my life, in a weird way, which I will also be writing about. And then I did this big project for the New York Times. Back in 2019, I published this list of “Christmas cookies that will impress everyone you know,” which then figured into their video series early on. And then they started doing what they have now. In that video, there were a lot of “self-decorating” cookies, so there will be a lot of these little groupings. It’s a little more creative in that way, not so much a classic baker’s book.

JZ

More of an artist’s book. Have you come up with a title?

SS

I have a list, but I can’t tell yet! [Laughs.] Although the sentence “Everyone loves cookies” has definitely been in my head a lot.

JZ

Well, everyone loves cookies! I’m curious about this path from fine arts to cookbook writing: you went to art school, and where did you end up from there?

SS

I always liked food, and from a pretty young age, I loved baking. Baking was my first love. In the lab—the cookie lab, as I think of it now—I’d be using my mom’s cookbooks, experimenting with cookies and cakes from McCall’s. It was one of the Seven Sisters, the ladies’ magazines that were aimed at services for women—Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, publications like that. So my mom kept their compendium, sort of a McCall’s cookbook. They had a lot of baking recipes. I loved perusing those pages and seeing what I could do. When I was in art school, I always worked in restaurants too. To me, they went hand in hand. I worked in places where a lot of artists came and went, and I saw how art and food went together and how artists were really good at cooking. And later I worked at Gordon Matta-Clark’s restaurant FOOD, when I came to New York, which was very much an artist hang out. I was always trying to merge them, and then I came to food styling. At first, I worked in the industry, and I really enjoyed it, but I realized I didn’t want to be cooking on the line, and I didn’t want to be in catering. After a while, it was like it was more creative, but I just craved creativity more and wanted to be valued for ideas. So eventually, that passion led me to Martha Stewart Living when that magazine was starting, which was a dream job for me.

JZ

Like just about everybody, I watched that documentary about Martha Stewart, and the Omnimedia idea is just brilliant.

SS

Did you see me in there?

JZ

I did, I loved it! And how did you like working at Food? That sounds like a pivotal moment to have been there.

SS

I’ve thought about FOOD a lot lately, because a filmmaker called Zach Miller is making a documentary about it now. I came to New York in 1982, in my twenties, and I had been living in Aspen for a couple years. I moved to New York because I had an opportunity for an apartment there. I was starting to feel like, my brain will rot if I stay in the mountains forever. [Laughs.] That’s a real thing. I would see certain middle-aged people walking around—now, it’s okay to wear a baseball cap, but I remember seeing this guy one day, and I was thinking, “Oh, God, I don’t want that to happen to me,” you know? I’ve got to get out of here.

JZ

What brought you to Aspen initially?

SS

I went on a family vacation with my parents. My dad was a skier, so was my brother. It was when I was in school, and I just really liked the vibe of the town. At that point in my life, it’s a little more complicated, because my sister had died right at the beginning of my college experience, so I was just always a little uncomfortable in school. I never really caught up afterward, because it happened in the first month of my time at college. I think I just wanted to get away. And in your twenties, you’re just thinking, maybe it’ll be different in this other place. It felt very safe, like something I could handle, that little town.

JZ

And then after some years there, you’re ready to try New York.

SS

Right, and when I got to New York, that job at FOOD was the only one I could find. I thought I wanted to waitress, because I thought I would make more money waiting tables. But I’d walk around the city, trying different places to “trail,” and there were all these actress types in these jobs. It wasn’t for me. So I went into Food for a bowl of soup, tired of pounding the pavement, and it said Help Wanted in the window. I think it was $4 an hour, or $4.50 I think. It was post–Gordon Matta Clark’s era; it had become a commercial enterprise at this point, but it was just a few years after Gordon’s run. I worked there for four years.

JZ

Did you see it change a lot in that period?

SS

It was in stasis at that point—it had already become something else, but it was a great place to land. All the artists came in there. It was in the middle of Soho, where the galleries were, pre-Chelsea. It was on the corner of Prince and Wooster. I just loved seeing people coming in and out. I saw the same customers I would see in Aspen, and I was always thinking, what are you doing in the city, off the mountain? Because I worked in a cafe there too. When I worked at Food I was still taking art class. I was at the Art Students League and at Parsons a little bit, doing more painting because I had majored in printmaking in school. I thought, Why did I choose printmaking as my major? All I did was make monoprints, which was great, but I wanted to paint, so I took classes at the Art Students League and painted a little bit at home. But I didn’t feel I was going to make it as a starving artist, because I didn’t really want to starve. [Both laugh.]

JZ

So you’re thinking, well, I like food...

SS

I just kept leaning more towards food. I would try to do both, but I needed to make a living. It wasn’t like it is now, where you have the internet to find things out. It was a lot harder to discover things, you had to talk to people, you had to be out in the world. I had no idea what a food stylist was, or how magazines were made. After Food, I thought I wanted to be a caterer, so then I worked in catering for a while after that—I wastrying to resist restaurant work, since I knew that wouldn’t be very fulfilling, especially for a woman at that point. I didn’t know what the jobs were, I was completely self-taught.

JZ

Did I read that you worked as a pastry chef?

SS

I did. It was a fancy title I got at Coco Pazzo, which was a great restaurant that opened in 1991, I believe. Someone recommended me to the chef, Mark Strausman, as a pastry chef. I thought, “well, I’m not really a pastry chef, but it’s fine, right?” They thought it was fine, and in the end, I actually helped with their New York Times review. Marion Burros, the food critic at the time, loved my desserts, and she wrote really nice things about the restaurant. I think that helped them get a three-star review in the Times, but the pastry chef period didn’t last long, because I was about to embark on my whole editorial career, which came about partly because I had met Martha Stewart before I started working at Coco Pazzo. I knew she was starting a magazine and they were putting together some test issues for Time Life, so I worked on a couple. They weren’t hiring yet because the magazine had not been greenlit, so I worked on those issues and then nothing happened. I knew Martha, so she would come into the restaurant, and I would send a little apple tart out to her table and go say hello. It ended up being a great confluence because some of the people that I met who were on staff with her would call me, like, “Susan, where do I get this ingredient?” I’d help them out, and they knew I knew what I was doing. And then they said, “Well, we’re hiring a food editor. Do you know anyone?” They could have gone through so many people, but I walked in the door and I really wanted it and I was really well suited to it. I stayed there for 12 years.

JZ

What was it like at the magazine in the beginning?

SS

Oh, crazy. Very ad hoc. The thing was, everyone on that original staff had come from other disciplines, from book publishing and other arenas, but not from magazines. So we weren’t making this in the mold of what magazines were doing. Even Martha was not in media. She had mostly published books and had had a big catering career. She’d become this lifestyle expert, so everybody had different backgrounds that were not traditional magazine publishing. We were breaking all the rules, and at the time, it was really something. It was a very fun and exciting time to be in magazines. We were also coming off the recession then, in 1990—I remember there were two new magazines that came out in the same year. It was Martha Stewart Living and Allure. Other than that, there weren’t a lot of new magazines launching.

JZ

Wow, and both of those brands certainly stood the test of time.

SS

Definitely, but unfortunately, print is not really viable anymore. You can bring print back, of course. You can have little print projects. But people aren’t in the habit of reading paper magazines anymore. I think I fought it for a long time.

JZ

Where do you stand with that now, publications being primarily digital? Do you miss print?

SS

I used to say print should never die. And then I stopped reading in print because, like everyone, I was getting everything everywhere else. The print issues stack up and you never get to them. But it was a rough transition. I also went from film to digital while I was working at MSL. I did a lot of food styling at the magazine, and film to digital was a transition, for sure. I don’t know if you remember a slightly insane period when everyone was trying to do iPad platforms—there was this idea that everyone would have all their subscriptions on their iPad! People couldn’t really understand how it would end up.

JZ

When you first started at Martha Stewart Living, what did it mean to be the food editor?

SS

I came on when the magazine was very small. At first, we only did six issues a year. Then we did 10, and then, I think by the end, there were 27 separate issues a year of different kinds, because we had the kids’ magazine and the wedding magazine.

JZ

And were you involved in all of them?

SS

I was involved in all of them. [Laughs.] I had a lot of staff, so eventually I became more of a manager. Again, self-taught, how to manage 15 to 20 people! I was just pretty good at it—I made mistakes because I was young, but I was 31 when I started that job. But it was challenging—it’s hard to manage people, and for whatever reason, it attracted mostly women.

JZ

What was that like? Did it make it easier or more difficult?

SS

You know, there was some sniping sometimes and people were competitive. It wasn’t always easy. You know how it is at work, I used to say that I felt like the mama bird trying to feed all the little birds. They wanted more money, or a promotion. People were constantly asking for something, so that was hard. Or they would go on parental leave, and at least 50% of the time they would want to talk to me when their leave was over and I knew what was coming: “I’m leaving—for good.” I think people don’t know what they’re in for, and understandably they either can’t handle it, or they can’t afford the childcare they’d need to take the job, or the math just doesn’t work. I always knew when it was coming. But it was fine, and it wasn’t my money. I wasn’t paying them.

JZ

How did your job change? By the end of 12 years, I’m sure the Omnimedia idea was a different beast.

SS

It was—we even went public during that time. In the beginning, it was just photo shoot after photo shoot, and tons of creativity and just working, working, working, creating stories, with no budgets. We basically had unlimited funds to work with, and we got to do so many very fun, cool, creative things and travel to different places.

JZ

How did going public change how MSL conducted business? Did it influence how ideas were broached?

SS

Yes, the bottom line became much more important, so the creative freedom that we enjoyed for so long was somewhat hamstrung. We had to do a lot more with a lot less, but we still tried to deliver the best content we could. It just became more difficult and stressful, and people were more spread thin.

JZ

What were some of the most memorable trips for the job?

SS

My all-time favorite was when we went to Abiquiú in New Mexico, up above Santa Fe. Georgia O’Keeffe lived in that area; it’s an absolutely gorgeous part of New Mexico. The shoot was for a woman named Elizabeth Berry. She had a bean company. There we were with her boyfriend, who was probably 30 years her junior, and she had this amazing home up in the hills of Abiquiú that had a grand piano inside, an outdoor kitchen with a dirt floor, gardens, views like you can’t even imagine. David Tanis, who’s been a longtime food columnist for The New York Times, was working in Santa Fe at the time, and he knew Elizabeth, because she was one of his purveyors, so he came to cook. I didn’t even know who David was—he wasn’t well known, like he is now.

We got to cook outside in this amazing place—it was one of the best experiences of my life. We were probably only there for two or three days. One night I had to stay in the Abiquiú Inn, because if it rains, the arroyos fill up, and you can’t make the journey to Elizabeth’s home—it’s super remote. And you can still camp—maybe I should say glamp—there, on all that gorgeous land. That was probably one of my very favorites, because it was just so special and memorable, and because of the people I was with.

Martha was there too—back then, Martha went on a lot of those trips, because she was part of the team and was there to be photographed, but she’s also a big adventurer, so she loved doing that stuff. She’d get in the truck with everybody else and go on a ramble. And another great trip was outside of Baton Rouge, in a city called New Roads, Louisiana. We went to New Orleans often, and that was super fun, because I just feel that New Orleans, of all the places in the United States I’ve been to, just has its own culture. You feel like you’re in another country. It has its own language and food.

JZ

I just went for the first time.

SS

It truly feels different. Also Ojai, one of my favorite places. We used to go shoot there quite a bit because Martha had a friend there. There’s an early picture of me assembling a wedding cake. We went on location all the time for things that you would normally shoot in a studio. That’s a good example. Like, a wedding cake—why are we out here? [Laughs.] Nowadays people just wouldn’t believe it, because nobody does that anymore.

In Abiquiú we also spent time with Anne Johnson, who was the art director on that shoot and a good friend of mine. We were all so close. It was really like a family. When I see those people, we’re still so bonded. I haven’t talked to Anne in years, but if I saw her, we’d be right back into it. It was just magical. We did a lot on the fly. We didn’t really plan things out the way people did later.

JZ

How did shooting for MSL compare to food styling later on film sets? Was it still more of a catch-as-catch-can approach?

SS

For something like Julie & Julia, I think I was very well trained because of all those crazy situations that I was in during the magazine years. If you’re not a very flexible person, you couldn’t do well in the film world, because things are constantly changing. They might say, “We’re shooting the scene today,” and then the end of the day comes, like, “Okay, that’s a wrap.” You ask about the scene, and they just say “Oh, we’re doing that tomorrow.” They don’t care that you prepped, they don’t care that the food might spoil. It doesn’t matter. Your needs are not important. And you have to really adjust to that. I was good at that whatever-it-takes mentality. I later worked with a director on some commercials. She would always say, “Keep your knees bent”—be ready, stay flexible, don’t let it get you down, because if you get upset that things are changing, you are not going to be good to work with. On a film set, more than anywhere else, you have so many people and so much money at stake; every minute costs so much.

JZ

How many people did you typically have helping you on those sets?

SS

Usually just one or two people, so a small team. For me, the hardest thing was understanding how the script translated to what I had to do. I would see one page and think, how can we be doing this all day? But it’s a dinner party with 12 people in it, which means we shoot the same thing over and over, from every angle, and it’s a two-shot and then a one-shot. I learned how to read to understand what the script meant for everyone’s time. One scene could take three days: dialogue and food together created lots and lots of work. As opposed to, say, a montage, where you can see everything quickly, just still shots laced together. Of course if they’re eating, and they’re actually eating, you need to have easy things to break into. I learned to make a salad that you could just spoon out, rather than a cake that you had to cut each time. Continuity is also an issue. In It’s Complicated, there’s a scene where Meryl Streep chops off a chicken leg because she’s mad at Alec Baldwin. So, okay, every take we need a new chicken. I think we shot over two or three days, and I did nothing but cook chickens, one after the other after the other, for about three days. Every crew member would come into the kitchen with the same dumb joke. I can’t tell you how many times I heard it. What do you think it was? “No chickens were harmed in the making of this film.” And I’d be like, “Yeah, yeah.”

JZ

Like, “Actually, I’m being harmed.” [Both laugh.]

SS

They all would come in thinking they were being so clever.

JZ

How did you start working with Nora Ephron for those projects?

SS

Nora was working on Julia & Julia, and I don’t think I’d heard about the project yet at that point—I think it came out in 2009, so that would have been 2007 or 2008. Noracalled me on the phone one day, on my landline, I believe. I think she said she tried to email me, but forgot the address or something. [Laughs.] So she called me, and of course I thought it was a friend of mine playing a joke on me. I was like, “Andy?” I thought, this can’t be! She told me she was working on a movie about Julia Child. She would call it “our movie,” and I always really liked that. She said that a couple people had recommended me—it was Ed Levine and Amanda Hesser, who was one of the founders of Food52. I met with Nora, and I met the prop master, who had already had somebody lined up. I think he was a bit resentful that I was brought in, because Nora wanted more of a “name,” more of a person. So I don’t think he was happy about taking direction from me, but the movie succeeded!

JZ

What do you remember most from working on that movie?

SS

Well, of course, I loved working with Meryl. She was in character most of the time on set. Even when she wasn’t shooting, she was Julia. She really was Julia. I loved watching her work. The onion chopping scene, the tarte Tatin scene. I don’t know if you remember that omelet scene?

JZ

Did you have to teach her to make it, teach her the technique?

SS

Exactly, I would have to teach certain dishes—I trained Amy Adams more, since she had to do more cooking on camera playing Julie. I actually went to a cooking school with her for a couple days, so that she could get a hold on certain technical elements she had to work on, just general knife skills. The character also wasn’t supposed to be an expert, so it was okay for her to look like an amateur.

I have some photos of me with Nora, just bursting, because I was always in awe of her (and Meryl, of course). And for the omelet scene, I remember that very well because at one point, I walked into this shot by accident. One of my favorite sets was the one they built for the cooking school, Le Cordon Bleu. Mark Ricker, the production designer, did a fantastic job of recreating the meticulous detail from photos. I just wanted to hang out in these incredible sets. I loved getting to work with Meryl for Julie & Julia and It’s Complicated—I don’t know how many actors would still know or remember me now, but Meryl would give me a big hug and a kiss.

JZ

And for Eat, Pray, Love—were you traveling?

SS

Yes, it was surreal being on location in Rome for that one. We didn’t have a home base like in these other movies. We were on a soundstage, and we had a kitchen. For Eat, Pray, Love, we were just cooking out of a food truck on the fly—except we didn’t really get to use the food truck, because it was Rome and there was nowhere to park it. So we did some prep for one or two days at the food truck that was parked right near an underpass outside of the city, in an empty lot. It was such a funny moment, because my assistant, who was from Rome, and I were cooking in the truck. We had cars with drivers waiting for us all day to take us anywhere, and we would just cook out of restaurants if we needed to. My assistant was local, so sometimes I’d ask him to make certain dishes at home. He was great. He would just run around on his Vespa, nimble, getting more prosciutto, whatever it was we needed. It was very hot in Rome at that time. I remember I had to deal with these restaurant owners—we would use a restaurant as a location, the kitchen, the patio, the whole thing. For one scene, I had made this rabbit ragù. The people at these restaurants didn’t get that a lot of the food was scripted. We had to make what was written on the page. The owner of this restaurant was scoffing at our dishes, just didn’t understand why we would be making these decisions. [Laughs.]

Julie & Julia was great from beginning to end, because also, we didn’t know that Nora Ephron was sick, and this was her swan song. So that gave it even more meaning. It really felt like a family working on that film and then when she passed away, it was hard to believe.

JZ

How shortly afterward did she pass?

SS

A couple years later—she died in 2012, so three years after the movie came out. But she really had told almost no one she was sick. I went to the memorial service for her. People like Meryl and Martin Short got up there and spoke, and they didn’t know. She knew she wanted to work and make this movie.

JZ

Hearing these stories, I’m also curious about what you’re including in this book. You mentioned you’re writing an introduction and essays?

SS

Yes, this book will have some essays. I feel like there’s a resonance with certain recipes at different points—for example, the very first thing I did with Martha Stewart was cookies. It was the first issue of Martha Stewart Living. I came up with recipes and started making them and working with a photographer for the first time. There was a chocolate crinkle cookie, I had a coffee shortbread, and there were bizcochitos, a cookie from New Mexico that’s made with lard and cinnamon. I do remember a lot of them. I think I’ll write four essays, some of them pretty personal, and then the introduction. Of course, it’s about the recipes, but if people want to read the essays, they can.

JZ

Have you written in that way for other cookbooks?

SS

Not really. And it’s funny, because I used to say, if I ever write a memoir, it’ll be “My Life in Cookies.”

JZ

Now I know you’re working on the title. I’ll be thinking about this!

SS

I want to convey how they really do bring happiness, both to the maker and the eater. With everything that’s going on in the world right now, it’s been a real escape to get to focus on creativity. It’s been a great outlet in every way, critical thinking, creative thinking. Some recipes are very out there and ambitious.

JZ

The last thing I’ll ask: with your job at Martha Stewart, especially your position as food editor—of course this is a lifestyle brand. But were you aware of the impact this brand would have on the way people would think about “lifestyle”? Because I also feel that wasn’t such a discrete category—that was something Martha helped to originate.

SS

I think I knew in the moment that we were setting trends. People looked to us for inspiration and ideas. I could tell right from the start that it was just something special and with a special group of people. When I watched the documentary, it gave me a lot of perspective on everything, because when you’re in something and looking at it so closely, you’re not thinking about the impact necessarily, or the influence. I know people say Martha was the first influencer. But all of us were influencing people, for sure. I was somewhat aware, but also really, really busy.