If Courtney McBroom has her way, there will be a lot more cocktail parties in your future—and they will include food made from a line of products bearing the name of a Pee Wee Herman movie character.
The Los Angeles-based company is called Large Marge, and it sells hand-crafted savory and sweet items online, all available for nationwide shipping. In the savory department are queso dip, chili oil, and fresh fried tortilla chips. For those seeking a sugar fix, Large Marge has Prailinella (a pecan-based version of Nutella), a drool-inducing churro cake (yes, you read that right), and an eye-catching Neopolitan cake.
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The thrust behind the company is to make home cooking more approachable. “Everyone’s always going to bars, going to restaurants. They’re loud. You can’t control the music or what you’re eating or who’s going to be there,” McBroom says. “We want to do food products to give people the inspiration and the tools to start cooking and entertaining at home more, creating a new culture around the idea of conviviality around the dinner table.”
Courtney McBroom and Leslie Discher
McBroom has over a decade of experience in professional kitchens and has been immersed in food culture since she received “The Care Bears’ Cookbook” as a child. After graduating college, the native Texan was itching for a change; she stuffed as many of her belongings into her car as she could and drove from Austin to New York City. Upon arrival in the Big Apple, she sent her resume into Momofuku Milk Bar. She interviewed and was hired shortly thereafter.
On her first day at the bakery, she met Leslie Discher. “I remember walking in and it was just the two of us,” she says. “It was probably six o’clock in the morning. She was in charge of baking the cookies and showing me the ropes. We hit it off immediately and became best friends.”
McBroom stayed on for five years, working her way up to culinary director and co-authoring cookbooks with Milk Bar owner Christina Tosi. Discher had since moved to Los Angeles with the man who became her husband, and McBroom visited her there. “I’ve always thought Los Angeles was really great. It’s the perfect yin to the New York yang,” she says. Eventually, McBroom made the move, too, and convinced Discher to start a joint venture together.
The duo started doing pop-ups with the Son of a Gun restaurant group, working towards the goal of opening their own restaurant—and soon decided that wasn’t the right direction for them. After brainstorming on how to approach the food industry from a different angle, they came up with a line of food products in the vein of Betty Crocker, but more responsibly made and better tasting. Instead of canned goods and processed meats, Large Marge would make use of farmers markets and wholesome foods.
Vintage images on the company’s website, Tumblr, and Instagram harken back to an era when eating at home was the norm. “Though I wasn’t alive, in my mind I imagine people were connecting a lot more,” McBroom says. “There were no cell phones, no internet. People just cooked and ate together. I like the idea of that.”
To that end, Large Marge is developing party-friendly eats that encourage friends to connect in new and interesting ways. Frankenfoods are not on the menu, however. “We don’t want to make something shelf stable unless it will naturally be shelf stable. We don’t want to add any chemicals, additives, or preservatives,” McBroom says. The company’s queso, for example, is as shippable as any other product on the site, but must be refrigerated. “There’s no cheese in the world that should be able to sit out on the shelf indefinitely without going bad.”
The three-employee company is still in its infancy and will be growing slowly, without taking on investors. Discher acts as the “chill,” grounded partner, balancing McBroom’s detail-oriented yet wacky creativity. While they do cater the occasional party, that’s not the company’s goal. Rather, in regards to Large Marge’s future, McBroom cites a Slate article by Anna Wintour in tribute to Christopher Hitchen. It’s titled “The Ruined Table,” a phrase Hitchen coined to describe the scene at the end of a satisfying dinner with friends: dirty plates, wine glasses toppled over, cigarette ashes everywhere.
“No one really notices or cares [about the mess] because everyone is too busy laughing, debating, talking, really living in the moment, connecting, and having fun. That’s the ideal that we’re trying to create and promote,” McBroom says. Large Marge has more products and possibly a cookbook in its future. “I feel like people take home cooking too seriously. It can be fun. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how it turned out; what matters is the experience.”
