Alison Roman Just Can’t Help Herself

Alison Roman approves of creamed greens, knobby lemons, and iceberg lettuce. She’s a slicer of onions, not a dicer; a “ride-or-die corner person” when it comes to lasagnas and cakes. She doesn’t sift flour, soak beans, or peel ginger. Instapots are a no, as are runny dressings, tomatoes on sandwiches, apples as snacks, and drinks served up. Breakfast is savory. Naps are naked. Showers are “objectively boring” and inferior to baths. The thing to do, according to Roman, is to start the water, put on a towel, and head back into the kitchen. The amount of time it takes to fill the tub is roughly equivalent to the time it takes to tear up a loaf of stale bread, for croutons fried in chicken fat.

“You either like my style or you don’t, you’re into the vibe or not,” Roman told me, in October, sitting on a low-slung moss-colored velveteen chaise longue in a corner of her apartment, in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill. She had moved in a few months earlier, having outgrown a smaller nearby apartment and its snug, Internet-famous kitchen. FreshDirect bags that she had used to haul her belongings were still visible in a corner. The bones of the new place were industrial chic: exposed pipes, a brick wall painted white. Roman had added hanging plants, a rattan Papasan chair, and a modular sofa she got from Joybird, giving the loft-style living area a seventies-folksinger energy.

Dusk was falling. Marigolds sat on a coffee table in a green glass vase. Roman had just lit a candle and was playing moody music. Eighteen months after a disastrous interview and its attendant miseries—“I was single, I was cancelled, I was in a pandemic”—she was feeling reflective. “The only way I will be successful is if I’m myself, because (a) I can have a really shitty attitude if somebody asks me to do something I don’t want to do and I can’t be myself, and (b) there’s so much noise out there, so many people that develop recipes, so many places that you can find one.”

It’s hard, even for Roman, to put a concise label on what she does. She’s always a cook, often a writer, occasionally a performer, and never a pushover, even when she’s getting in her own way. “In a world where everyone feels the need to be excessively polite, she’s excessively herself,” David Cho, a business adviser who consults on her projects, told me. Roman made her name as a food columnist and the host of cooking videos for Bon Appétit and the Times. Her cookbooks, “Dining In” (2017) and “Nothing Fancy” (2019), have together sold around four hundred and fifty thousand copies. She also maintains a popular Instagram account (“Does broccoli undo alcohol? 🕵🥦🤷”), a YouTube channel (half a million views for a summer pasta salad), and a monthly newsletter (titled, somewhat pissily, “A Newsletter”). She is home cooking’s most relentless polemicist, pairing a preference for high-acid, crunchy, creamy, herby, briny, chili-flaky food with salty takes.

Roman writes in the preface to “Nothing Fancy” that she has “always been allergic to the word ‘entertaining.’ ” Yet teaching her audience how to entertain—even if she calls it “having people over”—is a large part of what she does. The distinction seems to be about the appearance of caring overly much. In Roman’s world, an admission of effort must be offset by an ungiven fuck. “Roasting a nice chicken for people is such a good way to say, ‘I love you,’ ” she writes. “I recently found this note to myself scrawled on the back of an electrical bill that I had probably forgotten to pay, written one night after a dinner party.” If Roman is putting out little things for people to eat, she’s calling them “snacks,” not canapés. If she’s batching up Martinis, she’ll be serving them in a repurposed flower vase.

Roman’s studied imperfectionism lowers the threshold for emulation, creating a strong sense of intimacy with her fans. “They have to care about you for them to care about the chicken,” she told me. Ina Garten was half a century into her career before she publicly discussed her decision not to have children. Roman, who is thirty-six, will accompany a recipe for matzo-ball soup with her feelings about “injecting myself with hormones that will encourage my ovaries to produce more eggs than usual so that a nice doctor can go into my body, pluck them from my insides and freeze them for a later date.” Garten gave us the dish that became known as Engagement Roast Chicken; Roman writes of Goodbye Meatballs, named after a dinner so bad it may have got her dumped.

This year, at least five American adults dressed up as Alison Roman for Halloween. In Roman’s home office, she has a framed note hanging above her desk. It’s handwritten on thick card stock with a lengthy monogram: “SENT WITH LOVE AND HUGS FROM THE DESK OF TAYLOR SWIFT.” The note begins, “Full disclosure, this is a full fan letter.” Swift’s favorite Alison Roman dishes, it turns out, are Baked Ziti, Tomato-Poached Fish with Chili Oil and Herbs, and a Caramelized Shallot Pasta that became a viral hit early in 2020. The recipe for the pasta was simple: bucatini, if you could find it, with a jammy sauce of tomato paste, heaps of alliums, and a whole tin of anchovies. “The quintessential Roman recipe has an accessibility and a complexity, and, much like with all of Alison Roman, there are two things in direct conflict with each other that don’t seem like they should work,” Cho said.

Shortly after the recipe was published, the pandemic shifted Roman’s field of expertise—dining in—to the center of the conversation. She seemed to be everywhere: drinking spritzes with Katie Couric during an Instagram pasta tutorial; comparing different types of tinned fish, remotely, on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”; cooking chicken with lentils on Zoom and popping a caramelized onion into her mouth as though she were taking a shot. Eventually, the shallot pasta would be NYT Cooking’s most popular recipe of 2020, a tubular strand connecting social media to solitude and celebrity to civilian, with Roman occupying the charged territory in between.

“The shallot lady is about to get caught up in something,” the comedian and actor Brittani Nichols tweeted, on May 8th. “There’s simply no way a white woman can survive this kind of attention.” The joke was apt: that week, an online publication called the New Consumer featured an interview with Roman in which she blasted the tidying expert Marie Kondo and the model and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen, making a mess of her own career in the process. Roman says she didn’t realize that she had chosen two Asian women as the target of her criticism—Kondo is Japanese, and Teigen’s mother is from Thailand—but plenty of people did, detecting in her comments mean-spiritedness or casual racism. Teigen, with more than twelve million followers, tweeted her disappointment.

Maybe because people were starved for scandal at the height of the lockdown, the back-and-forth between Roman and Teigen dominated various sectors of Twitter (food, feminist, antiracist, New York media, celebrity gossip), and overflowed into the general press (“Good Morning America” devoted a segment to “Alison Roman’s foodie fight with Chrissy Teigen”). Maybe because in some corners Roman had a reputation for insensitivity, few of her peers leaped to her defense. She had lived by the social-media sword and was now dying a slow and gory death by it. “alison roman may be cancelled but the turmeric stain on my mattress from when i made one of her chicken recipes and threw up is forever,” Lauren Budd, a TV writer, tweeted, garnering more than a thousand likes. The social-media maelstrom eddied until everyone who went anywhere near it had been somehow damaged.

When I met Roman, this fall, she compared the experience to that of a lobster in a pot of cold water. “You bring it up to a boil, they never know,” she said. “And then they’re dead.”

This fall, Roman was shooting a Thanksgiving special for her YouTube series, “Home Movies,” which she launched in January. The series is shot in a vérité style, with free-flowing banter from the sidelines, overlaid in production with cutaways and meme-friendly graphics. In the development phase, Roman had created a mood board; it referenced “High Maintenance” and “Broad City” rather than cooking shows. She wanted the videos to feel “more lived-in, more real,” her personality less sanitized than “the really wholesome version” of herself in the videos she’d created for other outlets.

Roman sits awkwardly within the tradition of the “domestic goddess”: the expert on food and festive gathering who is always a woman and who has historically often been attractive, wealthy, and white. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation once noted that Roman has been called “the millennial generation’s Nigella Lawson”—a clichéd description that’s nonetheless helpful in understanding what categories Roman is operating within and against. The classic domestic goddess orients herself toward others; her register is the second person (“You take the Parmesan . . .”). Roman’s pedagogy, on the other hand, is proudly egocentric. Hospitality is foremost about pleasing herself. “And then to serve it, if I were having you over, which I’m not, I would probably just, like, bring this whole pot to the table,” she says in one video. “And then I would set out cheese, with a Microplane, and you can do it yourself, ’cause I’m not your mom.”

Embedded in Roman’s recipes, there is a lot of anxiety about money, class, success, travel, and real estate, and about staying true to some primal early-adult identity as she has gained access to those things. For all her renegade attitude, she is strongly concerned with perception. She often seems to be working away from things she finds off-putting, whether that’s Martha Stewart-esque chatelaine style (reminiscing about eating tomatoes at a “fantasy upstate house,” she’s sure to note that it “definitely did not belong to any of us”) or the earnest PBS travelogue voice (“Sure, I could tell a story about how this Very Good Salmon, smothered in a tangy dressing made from whole lemons, diced shallot and just the correct amount of fresh oregano, reminds me of a trip to Greece I once took. But I am an honest woman and I have never been to Greece, so consider yourself spared”).

In New York, Roman told me that she had a fraught history with Thanksgiving, having “spun every spin” over years of producing seasonal content for various employers. (She said that she’d decided to quit Bon Appétit during a meeting for a Thanksgiving issue. “Everyone was shitting on every idea: ‘How do we make it new? How do we make it different?’ ”) In 2020, she sat the holiday out. This year, fully freelance, she was doing it her way, which turned out to be pretty classical—a “regular-ass Thanksgiving,” she was calling it. The shoot was to take place over two days at her apartment. She would prepare the entire meal by herself in sequential order—no sub-ins or switch-outs—and then serve it, on the second evening, to a group of friends.

Just before 10 A.M. on the first day of the shoot, Roman came home with the shopping, which she had done in her neighborhood, camera in tow. Now she was in her kitchen, barefoot, hydrating from a plastic pint container. Crumbs and garlic skins rustled underfoot. The atmosphere was orderly and relaxed, with the slightly slaphappy energy that comes when a group of people agree to be shut in a warm room for hours on end.

“He filmed the first part with mascara on my face,” Roman was saying to the crew, which included David Cho; Dan Hurwitz, the director; a cameraman; a sound person; and Roman’s assistant, Jane Morgan. “It’s a boring story, but it’s because I wear a serum that makes my face look healthy and dewy and—”

“You’re not wrong about that story,” Cho said, making everybody laugh.

Roman’s first task was to make turkey stock, roasting the wings before throwing them in the pot with the neck and the liver—“not required of anybody,” but worth it, she swore. While the stock was simmering, she seasoned the turkey. “I like doing this so much,” she said, gently rubbing a mixture of brown sugar, pepper, and kosher salt into the crevices of the bird. “It’s kind of romantic . . . you’re taking a lot of time and tender care with something.”

She even appeared to be blushing, although it could have been the heat and the smoke. “It’s honestly like decorating a cake with sprinkles,” she said, modelling a cupping motion with her hand. Alert, even in the midst of doing so many things, to the possibility that the metaphor might not make sense to inexperienced cooks, she segued to a new one: “Almost like if you’ve ever built a sandcastle.” She carried the turkey to the refrigerator, clearing out some vegetables to make room: “Step aside, leeks!”

The next day, the crew convened at 8 A.M. The day’s agenda included an apple tart, two pans of stuffing, buttermilk mashed potatoes, roasted mushrooms and green beans, leek-and-greens gratin, roasted squash, two salads (“making two is optional, but making one is mandatory”), and, of course, the turkey and gravy. Roman started with the tart, rolling out the dough, filling it with disks of apple, and sealing the crust with an egg wash.

“If you don’t have a hairbrush, use your fingers,” she said. “If you don’t have a pastry brush, use your fingers. If you don’t have a paintbrush, use your fingers. I bet there’s some sicko out there who would watch five hours of applying egg wash.”

“Hey, we don’t kink-shame here,” Cho chimed in.

Between takes, Roman checked her phone, grousing at a negative comment on her Instagram feed and poring over an article in the San Francisco Chronicle that wondered how Grey Poupon had managed to sell out its “terrible mustard wine” in one day. The article concluded that the product’s success was “possibly due in part to the fact that cooking celebrity Alison Roman peddled it in an ad during a frittata demonstration video.”

“Do you think Grey Poupon will give us a raise?” she said.

It was five o’clock—time to get started on the sides.

“Mashed potatoes, let’s fucking go!”

At her best, Roman is the loose, whistle-twirling swim instructor of the kitchen, urging you to jump on in, the water’s fine! Her audience is made up of home cooks of all levels, but she is especially sympathetic to the misgivings of beginners. She tends to work with ingredients that are readily available, validating omissions and substitutions, respecting budgets, and keeping the dishwashing burden light. Attempting shrimp cocktail at home? Don’t bother deveining. Brining a chicken? Use a ziplock and whatever pickle brine, buttermilk, or beer you’ve got in the fridge.

Roman typifies a narrow demographic while appealing to a wide audience—her own cohort; younger people, who aspire to her sophistication; older people, who’d like to recapture their quasi-bohemian youth. At her place, it’s nighttime, the plates don’t match, your phone’s on the table, and the candle’s burning down to a nub. Her high-spirited, offhand quality makes you feel that the most important element to any meal is gameness. If you could “throw your own hot dog party,” why wouldn’t you?

Watching her cook, I learned that you don’t have to take the seeds out of a honeynut squash before roasting it, that you can avoid gummy mashed potatoes by warming up the milk before you add it, and that the old trick of adding a hint of soy sauce to a green-bean casserole—from a recipe on the Campbell’s soup can—works equally well for a modern cousin, Frizzled Green Beans, Mushrooms, and Onions. “What makes Alison really unique is blending that high level of detail with a totally casual tone and attitude,” Francis Lam, the editor-in-chief of Roman’s cookbook publisher, Clarkson Potter, told me. “She never makes her recipes feel like an imposition.”

Preparing one of the Thanksgiving salads, Roman said, “If you think about what is going on here, it’s literally just me talking to myself for forty-eight hours.” She plunged a thermometer into the breast of the turkey, breaking into giggles. “One-fifty-five, baby!”

Roman’s mother once compared her palate to that of “a little deer on a salt lick.” She grew up in Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, where her favorite restaurant was Tail o’ the Pup, a hot-dog stand shaped like a hot dog. She liked to eat chicken bouillon straight, dipping her fingers into the packet. “I always had a large milk-carton-shaped box of Goldfish from Costco under my bed for snacking, which is a gross thing to admit,” she recalled. As a Southern Californian, she had access to fine produce and an array of international cuisines. She learned to tell Thai basil from Italian basil and stained her clothes with pomegranates so often that her mother stopped buying them. Her father told me, “I remember going to sushi and Alison was eating urchin.”

Roman’s father worked as a salesman, her mother as a court reporter. (The family’s last name was originally Romanoff, but Alison’s paternal great-grandfather “offed the off” after immigrating to America from Russia as a child.) Roman went to a private Catholic high school, where she tried hard to fit in, blowing her Jamba Juice paychecks on scented body lotion and attending a rave in the desert with friends “after getting invited by two dudes we met in front of the movie theatre.”

Eventually, she started to want to be somebody other than “Valley Ali.” She bounced between community colleges. She had an older boyfriend who was into food; he introduced her to Sona, in West Hollywood—“the most ambitious restaurant to open in Los Angeles in a long while,” according to a 2003 review in the Los Angeles Times. The restaurant, run by David and Michelle Myers, had a reputation for “intricate, cerebral cuisine”: thirty-six-course tasting menus, “albacore scattered with pumpkin seeds and wasabi caviar.” Ron Mendoza, a former Sona pastry chef, recalled, “A lot of places just wanted to please anyone that came in the door, but the idea was more, O.K., you’re coming into our house right now and kind of have to accept our rules.” One day, she knocked on Sona’s back door; Mendoza answered, and she told him that she was thinking about culinary school. He advised her to save her money, and hired her.

At first, Roman worked in a high-end pastry shop that the Myerses also ran. She spent her days cutting marshmallows. (“They wiggle around when you put your knife in—never try,” she recalled.) “I walked home crying every day, but not once did I think about quitting,” Roman said. “I figured, I’ll stop crying when they stop being mean to me, and they’ll stop being mean to me when I stop screwing up.” She remembers herself, at this time, as “an annoying little puppy” in black-framed glasses and thick bangs. Karen Yoo, who supervised her at the restaurant, added that she could be headstrong. She joked, “I named my first gray hair Alison Roman.”

Every afternoon, Roman would run a tray of petits fours to Sona for the dinner service. “I loved the energy of the kitchen, and how fast people were moving, and how gruff and short with each other they were,” she said. She soon became a cook for the restaurant. She lived with two co-workers and, in their free time, they participated in seaside workouts that David Myers had dreamed up after reading a book about Navy Seal Team Six. “Mara dubois / tangerine saffron granita / cardamom i.c. / basil puree / black olive powder / chai spiced foam / orange tuile,” reads a page from a notebook that Roman kept in 2005. Another entry, involving a cake made from beets and white chocolate, reads as though she were trolling her future self.

After a couple of years at Sona, Roman wrote “fourteen thousand e-mails” to Daniel Patterson, the chef at Coi, in San Francisco. (“Never responded to one of ’em. Fuck that guy!”) She moved to the Bay Area anyway, where she worked as the pastry chef at a Peter Thiel-backed club and restaurant called Frisson, and ran the pastry department at Quince, an Italian-influenced contemporary-Californian restaurant that now has three Michelin stars. Roman moved to New York in 2009, seeking “general life change and exploration.” Soon, she landed a part-time job as a “Milk Maid” at Milk Bar, the trendy dessert shop. She took on a second gig, at Pies ’n’ Thighs, in Williamsburg, rolling buttermilk biscuits eight hours a day. Bon Appétit was looking for a recipe tester, and Roman, looking for a way out of restaurant kitchens, went for an interview. Roman writes in “Dining In,” “They showed me a photo of biscuits and asked, ‘Can you make a recipe for biscuits that look like this?’ ” She got the job, immortalizing the experience in the introduction to a recipe that she calls Luckiest Biscuits in America.

At the time, Bon Appétit was led by Adam Rapoport, a former style editor. Critics have said that, under Rapoport, the magazine developed a clubby ethos, which manifested itself in everything from the internal culture to a video on pho; members of the staff said that employees of color were disrespected and underpaid for video appearances. (Like this magazine, Bon Appétit, for which I once wrote an article, is owned by Condé Nast. The company says that it conducted an extensive study of Bon Appétit’s video pay practices, and found that employees had been fairly compensated. Rapoport resigned last year after the writer Tammie Teclemariam tweeted a 2004 picture of him dressed, for Halloween, as a “Puerto Rican.”) Roman rose steadily at the magazine. In four years, she went from recipe tester to senior food editor, evolving from wide-eyed transplant (“My job does not suck,” she marvels, in an early video) to cultural arbiter (“Every Dinner Party Needs a Pre-Game”).

In 2018, she joined the Times as a food columnist. (“Alison Roman! Alison Roman!” read the headline on a piece announcing her appointment.) At the Times, she specialized in visually enticing recipes that brought a sense of youthful glamour to the staid domain of weeknight cooking. If you wanted to bake some salmon, you went to Mark Bittman; if you went to Alison Roman, you wanted to bake some salmon. She developed a robust following on social media. “Alison has a very strong visual sense and is a quick wit—a combination that made her a trailblazer on Instagram,” Lam told me. Home cooks made her recipes and posted pictures; Roman laboriously reposted their handiwork to her account, showing her fans love while making the agnostics wonder if they were missing out on something.

Roman’s interview with Dan Frommer of the New Consumer was intended as a business move. She and David Cho had been tossing around the idea of adding some merchandise to her Web site. “He was, like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna introduce you to my friend Dan. He does this newsletter that’s for people in the tech world and business, and not really your demographic, and I think it’d be really good for you,’ ” Roman told me. “Normally I would have passed and just been, like, ‘What the fuck is the New Consumer?’ ”

The interview began with the usual pandemic chitchat. As the conversation picked up, it centered on Roman’s desire to build a bigger business without sacrificing her principles or the messiness that had made her successful. “Is there anything you really want to do or really don’t want to do?” Frommer asked. Roman had sold a TV show to Hulu, though she said production had been stalled by COVID. She was collaborating with a cookware company on a limited-edition line of vintage-inspired spoons. She dreamed of buying a house upstate.

She also knew what she didn’t want her future to resemble. “The idea that when Marie Kondo decided to capitalize on her fame and make stuff that you can buy, that is completely antithetical to everything she’s ever taught you,” Roman said. “I’m like, damn, bitch, you fucking just sold out immediately! Someone’s like, ‘You should make stuff,’ and she’s like, ‘Okay, slap my name on it, I don’t give a shit!’ ”

She continued, “Like, what Chrissy Teigen has done is so crazy to me. She had a successful cookbook. And then it was like: Boom, line at Target. Boom, now she has an Instagram page that has over a million followers where it’s just, like, people running a content farm for her. That horrifies me and it’s not something that I ever want to do. I don’t aspire to that. But like, who’s laughing now? Because she’s making a ton of fucking money.”

At first, Roman thought that the interview had gone well. She was getting positive feedback for having spoken frankly about money. Still, there were rumblings of doubt on Twitter: Wasn’t all the high-minded talk about creative integrity a bit rich coming from someone with a limited-edition vintage-spoon line? Roman accused one critic of bullying a successful woman, then tweeted, “Just wishing I had someone to hold my hand during baby’s first internet backlash.”

Roman decided to get off social media for a while. She had just baked a chocolate cake for a friend’s bachelorette party when her manager called, saying that Chrissy Teigen’s manager had told her that Teigen’s feelings were hurt by Roman’s comments. (Kondo has not said much about any of this, but recently told the Daily Beast that “it’s completely natural for everyone to have different opinions.”) “This is a huge bummer and hit me hard,” Teigen soon tweeted, adding that she “genuinely loved everything about Alison.” Roman dashed off an apology tweet to Teigen and went to bed. “I put my phone away, and then woke up the next morning to a bajillion texts, more texts than I had ever seen in my life,” she recalled. “And I picked up my phone and was just, like, ‘Holy Moses, oh, my God, now we’re talking about race.’ ”

On May 11th, Roman issued a lengthy formal apology, saying that she had been “stupid, careless and insensitive,” and that “the fact that it didn’t occur to me that I had singled out two Asian women is one hundred percent a function of my privilege.” (She had also made a comment—“For the low, low price of $19.99, please to buy my cutting board”—that she said was based on an inside joke about an Eastern European cookbook.) Roman told me that it hadn’t occurred to her that Teigen would take offense. “It was, like, ‘You’re a hot billionaire supermodel married to John Legend, and I’m here covered in cat hair and a total mess,’ ” she said.

The Times suspended Roman’s column, a move to which Teigen objected, setting off another cycle of headlines. (This spring, Teigen stepped away from Twitter amid allegations of bullying, acknowledging that earlier in her career she had been “a troll, full stop.”) In one of the more incisive analyses of the affair, Navneet Alang, at Eater, wrote, “The backlash to Roman’s comments, like most backlashes, was a combination of legitimate grievance and the way that Twitter refracts and concentrates reaction.” Alang concluded, “If it felt as though people had been sitting around waiting for her to mess up, it was probably because many of them had.”

“I never thought I would be at the center of this,” Roman told me, in the immediate aftermath. “I thought I could hide behind chicken thighs my whole life and be, like, ‘Oh, whatever, I’m just over here making food,’ and now I’m in a very important conversation that I feel very ill-equipped to handle. But I’m going to handle it.” She continued, “Sometimes I wake up and I’m, like, ‘Oh, my God, is this navigable, and will I ever recover? Did I throw my entire life away?’ And then there’s also, like, ‘That’s a pretty big cop-out, and, if you’re gonna fucking step into it, step into it.’ ”

I decided to write about Roman in March of 2020, a few months before the New Consumer debacle. I didn’t own either of her books, and I don’t watch many cooking videos, but I had made and enjoyed a number of her recipes. (The Swiss Chard and Mushroom Galette ought to be up there with the Caramelized Shallot Pasta.) Usually, it takes some time to locate the pressure points of a story, and to find sources willing to speak about them, but, in this case, almost as soon as I started reporting, my phone and e-mail lit up. I heard from a number of women working in the food world; some were white, others were Black and brown. Several spoke on the record; others preferred not to, knowing that their comments would inevitably be construed as personal grievance when, in fact, they were less interested in singling Roman out than in making a wider critique of the food world. Two themes emerged: the sense that Roman was both a product and a perpetuator of structural racism in food media, and a wish that her sense of social responsibility was commensurate with the size of her platform. Osayi Endolyn, who writes about food and identity, told me, “You can’t really explain the phenomenon of Alison Roman as a figurehead without understanding how whiteness functions in America, and how whiteness functions in food and food media.”

In contrast to the geek-out approach favored by writers like J. Kenji López-Alt, Roman often presents herself as less informed than she is, or maybe ought to be. “I am not a vegetable scientist (lol) so I am not saying this is a FACT,” she writes, “but it *feels* like green beans have an especially tough, highly impenetrable exterior, but when they are warm, they seem to really accept flavor much better than when cold.” For all her outspokenness, she is reticent on certain issues. She’ll recommend a brand of pepper mill (Unicorn), or tell you what lipstick she’s currently wearing (Lasting Passion, a “really awesome orangey-red” from MAC), but she has little to say about the sustainability of tuna. “I speak to what I know,” Roman told me, adding that accessibility and affordability are also important aspects of the conversation. “I’m not a scientist, I’m not a food reporter, I’m not spending my time doing that research. How far does my responsibility extend?”

As the writer Andrea Nguyen has observed, the brash, prescriptive “bro tone” that has served many a male food-world personality so well is increasingly becoming gender-neutral. Roman has been one of its premier female purveyors, rarely shying away from—and occasionally picking—a fight. “Rice has always seemed like filler to me,” she wrote in 2016’s “Dining In,” dismissing the world’s second most important cereal crop as though she were swiping left.

At the end of 2018, Roman débuted what became known as #TheStew (né Spiced Chickpea Stew with Coconut and Turmeric). To make it, you soften garlic, ginger, and onions in olive oil. You add chickpeas, frying them with red-pepper flakes and turmeric, then simmer them in coconut milk. After wilting in greens, you serve the dish with mint leaves, a dollop of yogurt, and toasted flatbread. The recipe was healthful. It was warming. It was, to some readers, obviously an Indian chana masala or chole or, alternatively, a Jamaican chickpea curry. “This is neither a soup nor a stew, it’s called chana masala, and Indians have been eating it for centuries. Seriously, 🙄,” an Instagram user named Priya Ahuja Donatelli wrote, in the comments of a post in which Roman had announced a giveaway with an equity-focussed spice company, inviting readers to respond with their “favorite ideas for dismantling the patriarchy OR cooking with turmeric.”

Roman was speaking the language of social justice, but she wasn’t crediting the cultures from which she drew certain techniques and ingredients. She was shine theory in her head, but Sun Tzu in her heart. “I don’t read other cookbooks, I don’t follow anybody on Instagram,” she told me one day. “That clouds shit for me.” Nor did she acknowledge that her branding implied personal ownership over deep-rooted dishes. (“I wasn’t very thoughtful about it,” she said recently.)

“There’s a sense in editorial, publishing, and TV spaces that, if you are from a nonwhite background, what you talk about has to be generated from your identity in some way,” Endolyn told me. “But if you’re a white person you can go anywhere you want. You can talk about Asian cuisines, you can talk about African or African American cuisines, you can talk about South American cuisines. No one’s saying you can’t cook with turmeric—cook with turmeric, turn orange if you want to! The point is to recognize that people from nonwhite, non-Eurocentric cultures tend to be pigeonholed by their identity (which isn’t necessarily a measure of expertise) and not offered the same leeway to experiment, play, and ‘discover’ things.”

When Jezebel asked Roman about the issue of cultural appropriation, she dug in her heels. “Y’all, this is not a curry,” she said. “I’ve never made a curry.” She added, “I come from no culture. I have no culture. I’m like, vaguely European.” Through years of being told online that she was fat, that her pants were ugly, that her voice was annoying, Roman had learned to tune out negative feedback, positioning herself in opposition to whomever she perceived as a hater. She sometimes lent her support to progressive causes, but she was also hesitant to stray from her area of expertise, once telling Cherry Bombe, “Compared to a lot of women in our field and industry, I am definitely on the quieter side of politics, but that’s mostly because of my educational level.”

Her justifications and her critics’ objections converged at a certain point, with everyone agreeing that she just liked to make food that tasted good, without going much deeper. Her occasional attempts to take a more scholarly approach could feel half-hearted. “I’ve taken a negative public stance on rice in the past, and generally speaking, I stand by that stance,” she wrote in 2019’s “Nothing Fancy,” introducing a recipe inspired by tahdig, a Persian rice specialty. “But people can grow—so let me say this: Rice, sometimes you are great.” Her recipe, she said, “more or less gets the job done, without requiring the patience or technique (I have neither!).”

“Maybe that’s her genius, to say that the thing that she’s done exists in a complete vacuum,” the writer Alicia Kennedy told me. “It’s not new, but people don’t want new—they want what she’s selling.” You can detect the intentionality of her branding in her recipe titles and tags: The Only Piecrust, Everyone’s Favorite Celebration Cake, #TheStew, #TheCookies. “Low key, a lot of what I do is marketing,” Roman admitted to me one day, with typical frankness. She later added, “Marketing is not a pejorative.”

“The thing is that she has a culture, and it’s actually the dominant culture,” the food writer Charlotte Druckman told me. “It’s white-people food in that sort of aspirational, fratty, life-style-magazine area. And for her to call it ‘no culture’ is to dismiss the fact that she’s part of this cultural event.” Roman was willing to sound off on almost anything—why not a few words about the origins of turmeric? She was famously combative—why not fight a good fight, recognizing the flaws of a system that wasn’t her fault but nonetheless wasn’t fair? Why not make it her business to know what a chole is, if she’s getting paid to make chickpea stew?

In our early conversations, Roman claimed to understand, to some extent, the criticism. “I had a lot of friends—people of color—who were, like, ‘We experience this all the time,’ ” she told me, in April of 2020. “We do things for years and years, and all of a sudden a white person does it, and it’s, like, ‘Oh, look at this thing!’ ” But she was ambivalent about the charge of cultural appropriation. Eventually, she revised #TheStew’s headnote to include a reference to “stews found in South India and parts of the Caribbean.” Roman said that she had made the change because of the Internet outcry. “I didn’t call it a curry because it’s not a curry,” she said. “And I think that, if I had called it a curry, the same amount, if not more, people would have responded, ‘That’s not a real curry. Why are you calling it a curry?’ So, in that context, I could not win.”

Roman launched “A Newsletter” in June of 2020, acknowledging her choice of “a title so uncreative it could only have come from someone who never planned on launching a newsletter.” At first, it functioned both as a sort of missing-person bulletin, in which she could keep her fans updated on her whereabouts, professionally and emotionally, and as an instrument of penance, with which she would try to make amends. “While this newsletter is free and without a paywall, there will always be an option to subscribe for a small donation, with 100% going to a rotating monthly charity,” she wrote in the first dispatch, which was about tuna salad, the only food, she wrote, that she’d recently been able to summon the will to make. She published her e-mail address, promising to read and respond to every message she received. Within a few months, though, one could detect hints of her old pugnaciousness intermingling with newfound caution. Writing in August about making bean salads at a shared vacation house, she acknowledged that “it might become apparent I am not cooking alone, and I refuse to pretend that I am for the sake of sparing my friends and myself a Covid-dining-related public shaming.”

According to Roman, the Times told her that August that it wasn’t bringing back her column. In an e-mail to me, she wrote that she’d been led to believe that she would be returning, “so didn’t think I needed to figure out a plan re: income (in retrospect, very naïve lol).” (A Times spokesperson said that Roman’s “column went on hiatus in May 2020. She informed us that September that she had decided to pursue other opportunities.”) Roman was now the sole proprietor of a business she had never really intended to launch. The product she needed to scale up and even disrupt was herself. “I’m not trying to pivot to being, like, ‘All right, buckle up, this is my new food blog, and I’m going to teach you about racism,’ ” she said last year. “It’s about continuing to be myself, a more sensitive version of myself.”

Roman also lost the TV show that she had signed on to do with Hulu. “Nobody felt comfortable saying, ‘We think what she did was wrong,’ but nobody wanted to support me, so they just dropped me,” she said.

Soon, Roman switched to a for-profit model for her newsletter, though she makes a contribution of at least two thousand dollars a month to charity. With subscribers numbering in the five digits, she earns considerably more money than she ever did as an employee at Bon Appétit or the Times. But, more than a year after What Happened (as she often refers to the events of May, 2020), she is still raw. In the weeks that followed the public turmoil, she told me that she was going to get a publicist, “because it’s very clear that I can’t do this on my own anymore.” She definitely didn’t get one, as an awkward interview with the comedian Ziwe Fumudoh, in June, 2020, demonstrated. (Roman said that she had hoped to prove, by going on the show, that she wasn’t running away from dialogue about race.)

At one point during the Thanksgiving shoot, she pulled me aside to express her anxieties. “I have this façade that everything’s O.K., but sometimes I feel like if you blow on it, it’ll all fall down,” she said. “I just have to accept the fact that, regardless of what I said, there would still be people who would be, like, ‘You’re an ignorant white lady.’ ” At another point, she added, “I still have not seen a successful story of a woman getting dragged to hell in the way that I was and then coming back publicly and being able to talk. It’s like you either have to slink away into oblivion or just pretend it never happened.”

Roman recently began work on a third cookbook, about desserts. She had signed on to do it in 2018 but deferred the contract last year, feeling too depleted to conjure up a new angle on cookies and cakes. “I’m just trying to have as much fun with it as possible, because, honestly, I could not get it up for another cookbook,” she told me. Looking at images for the project, she added, “I think cookbooks can be very lonely books.” She explained, “It’s generally just a person with a plate of food.” To counteract her boredom—with herself, with the style she had spawned—she was going for a whimsical, sensual look, “even though I hate the word ‘sensual,’ ” she said. There would be cornbread in a field! A floating pie! Pineapples in rowboats! Her first two books had been filled with realistic celebration, bringing the FOMO of Instagram into print. Now she was calling attention to the staginess of it all. “I can’t feed the machine anymore. I need to be a different machine,” she said.

Her idea of a good time was also changing: for a recent shoot, she’d asked her friends to bring their kids. “I’m a generation older than the hottest, youngest, coolest people right now,” she said. She told me about a recent conversation with a friend: “We were talking about how old people think we are. Because they’re all, like, twenty-six! And she was, like, ‘We came of age being young. And now we’re in this weird in-between stage where we aren’t young and sexy but also don’t have kids and haven’t transitioned to being hot moms.’ ”

Last year, at the urging of her therapist, Roman took an Enneagram personality test. She found out that she’s a Type Four, the Individualist, an “expressive, dramatic, self-absorbed, and temperamental” profile to which she strongly relates. “I’m so at odds with myself constantly,” she told me. “I’m, like, ‘When will it be enough, what will be enough, what will make me feel secure?’ I have these issues with friendships and romantic relationships, the feeling that love is finite, the feeling that attention is finite, the feeling that there are only so many people that can share a space, and that I’m fighting for it all. It’s psychotic, because if I were more of a secure person I could just be, like, ‘Everyone can write a cookbook—who cares, I know I’m good.’ ”

Roman had been explicitly avoiding food that might revive the cultural-appropriation debate, sticking to Americana-style classics like shrimp cocktail and cinnamon rolls. The week before we met, though, she had published a newsletter titled “Gentle Lentils,” about a dish she had cooked for friends after medical procedures. “It should come as no surprise that nothing about me, including the food I cook, could be described as gentle,” she wrote. “But for those I love: I can be gentle! For those I love: I can cook gently!” She’d taken pains to provide cultural context, referring to the dish as daal. Some readers applauded her efforts. Others posted negative comments. “In my heart of hearts, I was, like, ‘You fucking idiot. Don’t cook with lentils,’ ” she told me.

I asked why she had done it anyway.

“Because I don’t want to operate out of fear,” Roman said. She concluded, “It just goes to show that food is very sensitive for people, and they feel underrepresented if they see someone with a large platform not taking it seriously. But there’s also a part of me that’s, like, Can we all just lighten up? Can I make a pot of lentils? Call it whatever the fuck you want, I don’t care.”

At around eight-thirty on the second evening of the Thanksgiving shoot, Roman’s guests started drifting into her Brooklyn apartment. They poured themselves drinks from a bar that she had stocked with various kinds of vermouth. Roman slipped into her bedroom and emerged several minutes later, having traded her sweaty, smoky jeans and shirt for a cropped cardigan, a chartreuse strapless dress, and an ankle mike that made it look a little like she was under house arrest.

“Let’s start Thanksgiving!” Roman yelled, just past nine-thirty, leading everyone to the table. They were being filmed, but it was a real party, too. At Roman’s left were Michael Wooten, a marketing director at the art gallery Hauser & Wirth, and Wooten’s boyfriend, who had slid into his D.M.s after Roman tagged Wooten in her Instagram stories. At Roman’s right was her boyfriend of nine months, a financial-services entrepreneur. (They met on Raya, a membership-only dating app, during lockdown.)

“There’s red wine, there’s white wine, there’s orange wine, there’s sparkling wine,” Roman said, standing to propose a toast. “You know, because you brought most of it!” The party lasted until 2 A.M., with the last stragglers sprawled on the couch, listening to Sarah McLachlan. Roman passed out immediately, and her boyfriend took a picture—the filthy soles of her feet sticking out from under a white duvet.

The following morning, Roman was heading to the Catskills. Last winter, she had finally bought a ramshackle mixed-use Victorian at the main intersection of Bloomville, a hamlet of about two hundred people, in Delaware County. We set out from Brooklyn in her white VW Tiguan. There were sunflower seeds in the crevices of the driver’s seat, and a euro in one of the cup holders. (She had been to Greece, at last, over the summer, and was proud of herself that, in an attempt to draw some boundaries, she hadn’t posted a thing about it.) The farther we got from the city, the brighter the leaves—a perfect ombré effect up the F.D.R. Drive, across the George Washington Bridge, and toward the Goshen Turnpike. “The house is quirky and it’s old as hell and it’s really interesting,” Roman said. “I’m putting more money into it than I thought I was going to, but I think it wants to have new breath in it.”

“Hey, girl!” someone called out to Roman as she pulled up to the gas pump at a service station in Delhi, the last town before Bloomville.

“Oh, hey, girl!” Roman replied. “Are you selling pies this weekend?”

A few minutes later, we pulled up to the house. Three narrow upper floors made up the residential area. On the ground floor was a retail space, which most recently housed Table on Ten, a locavore pizzeria and community space. Roman had bought the place for less than three hundred thousand dollars, inheriting with it an industrial-grade coffee machine and a wood-burning oven. She was planning to open a little market, selling pantry items. “If I want to do chicken broth, I’ll just make it in my kitchen upstairs,” she said. She was thinking of hosting small dinners once she got the dining room in shape. “I’m doing all these different things, and I’m not sure I would have taken any of those leaps had last year not happened,” she said. “I’m trying to create things that will outlive this moment, and that will be able to exist without me.”

Inside, the Roman trifecta—plants, candles, music—was in effect, and some sage sticks sat alongside a tarot deck on the coffee table. Some of the windows had been open for weeks, and it was cold. We bundled up and went to dinner at Brushland Eating House, a tavern owned by Roman’s friends Sohail and Sara Zandi. As we ate borlotti beans and rabbit roulade, a woman approached Roman. “I’m absolutely obsessed with you,” she said.

Early the next morning, a rooster was crowing in a neighbor’s yard. Sun filtered into the kitchen through an open door, weak and geometric. Roman made pour-over coffee, decanting it into an earthenware mug. She said that she was planning to name her store First Bloom—after Bloomville, and after the flowering that occurs when you pour water over fresh grounds. She checked her boots for spiders, put them on, and went to take the compost out. She had Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris” on the stereo, playing loud: The way I see it, he said / You just can’t win it / Everybody’s in it for their own gain / You can’t please ’em all. ♦