Even if you think you’re not familiar with food writer and internet personality Alison Roman, you might know some of her recipes, the most popular of which are known simply by titles such as (hashtag optional) #ThePasta, #TheStew and #TheDip.

Roman, a pastry chef and recipe tester turned cookbook writer, has long been an avid social media user, and began sharing her recipes on Instagram after the publication of her first cookbook, Dining In, in 2017.

That book features unfussy, chatty cooking instructions for everything from steak to bean salad, but it was her salted butter chocolate chunk shortbread recipe that was the first to earn its own hashtag, going viral as #TheCookies in early 2018 as Roman’s fans began sharing photos of their own batches of the shortbread.

Then in her mid-30s, Roman, who is in Australia next month for a series of appearances, including the Melbourne Writers Festival, soon became the darling of Millennial home cooks who enjoyed food but were often restricted by budget and a lack of fancy culinary implements. The Brooklyn-based Roman’s recipes, her wry writing style, social media presence and in particular the photos she’d share of her kitchen at the time – an ageing stovetop in a cramped space devoid of marble benchtops – were, as marketing department types like to say, relatable. Even her books contain the occasional burnt pie crust.

After more of her recipes were prefaced with a definite article, The New York Times hired Roman, who had previously written for Bon Appétit and Buzzfeed Food, as a columnist, and her star continued to rise. In 2019, she released a second cookbook, Nothing Fancy, focusing on simple dinner party fare (this one launched #TheStew).

She’s long been polarising; even the New York Times once described her as “home-cooking’s most relentless polemicist”.

But seven months later, in May 2020, as her recipes were being shared by an even greater audience now embracing cooking during the pandemic, Roman was abruptly “cancelled” after an interview with US online publication New Consumer in which she talked about model turned food writer Chrissy Tiegen, and Japanese decluttering queen Marie Kondo. Roman, who was launching a collaboration with a cookware company – a range of vintage-inspired spoons that she plugged in the same interview – took aim at Kondo as “capitalising on her fame”, and described Tiegen, who quickly moved from cookbooks to a Target product line, as having “people running a content farm for her”.

“That horrifies me, and it’s not something that I ever want to do,” Roman said in the piece. “I don’t aspire to that.”

‘Ultimately I was like, well, I make food and I make recipes for people and that’s the work that I do and I want to keep doing it.’

Alison Roman

The backlash, typically, was immediate; first for Roman’s seeming hypocrisy, and then for the fact that both the women she commented on were Asian. Roman was branded a perpetrator of the food media’s structural racism; the candour that had made her so popular was her undoing. The requisite Twitter controversy, a thousand think-pieces and social media users searching her accounts for historical transgressions ensued. Roman issued a public apology to both women, and took a hiatus from her New York Times column (she was officially dropped from the paper in December that year).

But for such a high-profile “cancellation”, Roman wasn’t banished for long.

A month or so later, she launched her newsletter (called A Newsletter) and by the end of the year, she started her YouTube series Home Movies, “unproduced” videos in which she cooks a recipe from scratch, bantering away unscripted.

“I didn’t really go away at all,” says Roman over Zoom from the US. “And I mean, it was the pandemic, so a lot of people went away.”

Even so, it was a quick recovery from such a public fall from grace.

“I think it’s … commensurate to like, punishment, crime. I’ve talked about it so much already in so many interviews and all the information kind of … exists out there,” she says. “I think any time anyone feels embarrassment or public shame, the instinct is to kind of … hide your head, and you know, stay quiet for a little bit, which I definitely felt, but ultimately I was like, well, I make food and I make recipes for people and that’s the work that I do and I want to keep doing it. And the people that like me and want to follow it can follow it – and they do.”

Her YouTube channel has 220,000 subscribers; her Substack newsletter has 236,000, from, she says, around 150 countries.

“I think the beauty of YouTube and the internet in general, is that things become widely shared,” she says. “It’s my goal to make sure it’s accessible to anyone, whether you’re living in Spain or India or Japan or the US, I think it’s cool that you can make the shallot pasta, or the stews or the soups. I get a lot of questions saying, ‘oh, where I live we don’t have buttermilk’, or ‘we don’t have this’, so I end up also learning what’s available in different places, which is very cool.”

A recent profile in London’s Telegraph magazine labelled Roman “the world’s coolest cook”. Her celebrity followers include Reese Witherspoon and Taylor Swift. Closer to home, Michaela McGuire, artistic director of the Melbourne Writers Festival, invited her to join the line-up after becoming enamoured of Roman’s no-nonsense recipes.

“Nothing Fancy is the cookbook that changed my weeknight and dinner party offerings from competent but unremarkable to deceptively distinctive and delicious,” McGuire enthuses. “Yes, Alison made it glamorous and fun to cook in a small kitchen, but most of all she made it relaxing. Her recipes aren’t fussy; her ‘One Pot Chicken with Dates and Caramelised Lemon’ takes 10 minutes to get in the oven and is a showstopping combination of all Alison’s favoured flavours and textures: salty, lemony, jammy, chilli-flaky, tangy.

“Halfway through Nothing Fancy there’s a pep talk titled, ‘when things don’t go well’, which reminds you that cooking and having people over is meant to be fun. She gives you permission to make something that’s amazing, if not perfect.”

Last month Roman published her third cookbook, this time focused on desserts. Sweet Enough adheres to her effortless chic schtick, and features sweet dishes that look much more complex to prepare than they are.

A dessert book seems a logical step for Roman, who, after dropping out of college, trained as a restaurant pastry chef, and worked at Sona in Los Angeles (where she grew up) and the much awarded dessert chain Milk Bar in New York, among other places.

Yet Roman declares herself “not a dessert person”.

What?

“I’m not! When I go out for dinner, I don’t really order dessert. If I’m having breakfast, it’s always savoury,” she says. “I prefer to cook, rather than bake… it’s just not in my personality.” She concedes that given her pastry background, she does feel a connection to desserts, just “not in the same way as someone who’s like, ‘oh I’m absolutely defined by my love of sweets’.”

Even as a kid, Roman wasn’t much of a sweet-tooth.

“I loved matzo balls, broccoli … the sweetest I would eat was oatmeal in the morning. All my cereal was unsweetened. That’s what I gravitated towards, like, a bagel and cream cheese, lox, salmon, whitefish; Jewish deli culture. Everything was savoury! I wanted salt and butter and onions.”

Which might explain why even in a dedicated dessert cookbook (admittedly one that she describes as for “dessert agnostics”), Roman has sneaked in a small savoury chapter.

“I think it’s nice to have dessert from a perspective of somebody who tends to favour those types of foods,” she says. “And for people who are, ‘ugh, I’m not really a dessert person’, I’m like, even you, every now and then, are going to need to bake a cake for someone, or cookies, or you’re bored and you’re like, ‘what am I going to do, maybe I’ll bake a cake’ – I feel like this book is for those people.”

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And perhaps also for people who enjoy her recipes but not necessarily Roman herself. Lots of her newsletter subscribers accidentally hit “reply” when they mean to forward the email on, and recently Roman had one with a message someone thought they were sending to a friend, that said “I really can’t stand her, but her recipes are the best”.

“Yeah, people have said I’m polarising [but] I think any individual on the planet elicits different responses. I have yet to meet a single human on this beautiful planet that 100 per cent of people like,” she says.

Especially if you’re famous. “And you know, I have opinions, and I’m happy to have them. I think some people don’t like it when people have too strong of an opinion, but … that’s OK. They don’t have to!”

For the record, Roman replied to the errant email.

“I responded to that person and I said that’s OK, and they replied and they were so embarrassed! But you know, I’d rather have somebody say I’m annoying than my food is bad, or that my recipes don’t work,” she says. “But they do work and the food is good! So we’re all good there.”

Alison Roman appears at The Melbourne Writers Festival, Melbourne Town Hall, May 5, http://mwf.com.au; Brisbane Powerhouse, May 7, http://brisbanepowerhouse.org and Sydney Opera House, May 9, www.sydneyoperahouse.com

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