Alison Roman on Recipes as Time Capsules

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TRANSCRIPT

SPENCER BAILEY: Hi, Alison. Welcome to Time Sensitive.

ALISON ROMAN: Hi. Thank you for having me.

SB: So, let’s just start with your new cookbook, Something From Nothing—a great name, a great title. In the book’s introduction, you write, “Even after all these years, I still struggle to succinctly describe my cooking style, but ‘something from nothing’ is as close as I’ve come.” What does the phrase “something from nothing” mean to you?

AR: It means that you are doing a lot with very little, which is just really me rephrasing something from nothing. But I think it really is, at the core, to me what I really love about cooking, and it’s like turning a thing or an ingredient into something more than what it started as. I mean, that is cooking. It’s a transformation process.

SB: Yeah. I was thinking about what makes your cooking so special, or your recipes, or how you have become what The New Yorker has called “a phenomenon.” I mean, I love the term “lo-fi” that you used in Dining In—that’s how you described your cooking. Or in Sweet Enough, you use the words “rustic,” “carefree,” “approachable.” I think there is this intentionally simple thing that you do with your recipes. They’re flexible. They’re unfussy. They’re not trying to do too much. You don’t want to leave twenty pans in the sink after you’re…

AR: I personally don’t, and I don’t want you to, either. I mean that.

SB: Your cooking and recipes also feel very personal. Do you think that you’re ultimately cooking for yourself and that that then translates to a certain intimacy that everyone else who kind of obsesses over your cooking feels?

AR: Yeah, I preach a lot about authenticity. I talk about it, and I try to live that way. I think that part of that is being honest. That sounds a little dramatic, maybe. For me, the recipes I write are an extremely honest and accurate reflection of where I am in life and what I’m cooking and how I’m eating, whether I’m cooking for myself or other people. It’s like, this is where I’m at right now. This is sort of like a time capsule.

I think that through that honesty, other people, they appreciate that and it resonates with them, maybe. I also think they learn to trust that. There’s a trust in a recipe in and of itself, like, okay, I know this is going to work. I’m going to spend the time and the money on the ingredients, and I know that it’s going to work—building trust in that way. So it really, I think, boils down to trust, which, again, sounds kind of dramatic, but I really do think that that’s what it comes down to.

SB: I like that you’ve made a point, too, to read the recipes before you try and cook them.

AR: Oh, God.

SB: I know I’m guilty of this where I’ll see the recipe…

AR: Please stop. You must stop. You must, please. Dear God, read the recipe. I say “we” as if I’m speaking for the whole community of recipe-writers, but truly, if you knew—if you could picture me writing this book and what I went through to get these recipes onto the page and the way that I trimmed and sculpted to make all the information fit onto one page to make sure that you succeeded—you would read it all. You would feel so bad if you skipped anything. You’d be like, “Oh God, she spent so much time and effort on this. I really should read the whole thing.” So just think of that: I am guilt-tripping you.

SB: Yeah. Okay. Guilty. But I think also what I love about your recipes—and I have cooked many of them—is this sort of appreciation of imperfectionism. You’re kind of saying, “Here’s the recipe, but you can make it your own, and it’s okay to mess up and improv.” I loved this recent video that you made cooking on vacation in Sicily, because I think that that’s like true Alison Roman, and it shows you in this place you’re presumably renting or something.

AR: Yeah, an Airbnb.

SB: And there’s a tiny little pot. You don’t have all the tools that you need. You only have the ingredients you could find, and you’re in a kitchen that’s not your own and you’re making it all work.

AR: In a dream scenario, that’s how I cook all the time. Nothing makes me happier than, at this point, being thrown into an unfamiliar cooking environment to do my thing and figure it out. It’s so easy to cook with your creature comforts and the pot that you always use and the ingredients you always have—but you fall into a rut. I think everybody feels that way. Everyone’s like, “Ugh, I have the same ingredients, I have the same pantry, I have the same things.” But putting yourself in a new and unfamiliar environment and a new unfamiliar kitchen with new access to different ingredients, it really does sort of spark something new and exciting for you. I think in that specific instance, I didn’t have access to ingredients that maybe were that unfamiliar. I actually had limited ingredients, but in general it’s sort of inspiring. That was a very distilled version of me, for sure.

SB: So, just going back to the “something from nothing” phrase, I was thinking about, okay, yeah, great title for a book and it totally makes sense from a food perspective, but I was wondering if you’ve also thought about it more broadly, like about your trajectory overall. I ask this also, because it’s like, if we’re getting very philosophical, which I tend to do on the show… Every human being or living thing is something from nothing.

AR: That’s true, yes. We all come from nothing. I guess it’s funny, yes. But really, I didn’t name it for any of those reasons. It really was food-related, but I do think that [the phrases] “nothing fancy,” “sweet enough,” “something from nothing,” especially, all speak to me, I guess, or if I had to describe my personality, I feel like “sweet enough” especially was very sort of double entendre. It was just like, it’s sweet enough. People asked me about that in interviews. Some people got it, some people didn’t get it. It wasn’t meant to be edgy, but it was also extremely descriptive of the book, where these are desserts, but they’re not overly sweet. They’re sweet enough. It’s enough to tell you that it’s dessert but not so sweet. I find that to be the case with this book as well, where I sort of struggled to figure out what the name should be, because I didn’t want to include the word pantry. It felt so dowdy and sort of basic. I didn’t want to oversell it as if it was just a book of simple recipes, because some of them take a few hours; some of them have more than six ingredients. I really just wanted it to be like, what is the distillation of this style of cooking? I was like, oh, this encapsulates it. Somebody was like, “Oh, did you title it that because you were pregnant when you wrote the book?” I was like, no. but I could see why you would make that connection.

SB: I mean, like you said, there’s a sort of diaristic quality to your cookbooks on some level.

AR: Yeah, and maybe that’s why people like them.

SB: You describe yourself as “frugal with my ingredients and my time,” and, this being a podcast about time, I wanted to at first ask, where do you think that frugality comes from?

AR: Probably not having any money for so much of my life or any time. Now, I think that any person who ever at some point in their life didn’t have money, it stays with you for the rest of your life. And maybe that’s not true. I’m speaking anecdotally, from people that I spend time with that have maybe been in the same position where I left home at 18, I didn’t have any resources, a safety net, no plan. I left, I got a job, and that was the money that I had that I earned in a restaurant. So, if I could make a living, pay rent, that was all I was concerned about. That was it. I didn’t have the mentality that money was this thing that I could access. Buying ingredients when I was cooking—which, honestly, I didn’t really get into home cooking until way after I started.

Basically, I didn’t really get into home cooking until I left restaurants because, when you work in a restaurant, you spend all your time there, which means you eat all your meals there and you eat very well in a restaurant if you eat at all, I suppose, because you work so much. It wasn’t until I left restaurants and then started trying to get work outside of that that I started buying ingredients and then, hey, you really are… That’s a really “something from nothing” situation. How far can you stretch a head of cauliflower? How many potatoes can you get for two dollars? What does a bag of lentils cost?

I think that it’s not just about that. As a person who really cares about food, it’s like, okay, can you get the bag of lentils for two dollars and then get the really expensive nice lettuce greens from the farmer’s market, because you really care about that. This book has both in it. It’s very high-low, I think, or rather, it encourages high-low. I think if you have a well-stocked pantry, then it also frees you up to be like, “Well, I’m going to treat myself to get a really beautiful steak.” I’m not encouraging you to do that every night. Once a month you’re like, “I’m going to splurge because I know that in my house I have potatoes and a stick of butter and some garlic, and that’s going to be an amazing meal.” And that to me is still kind of a something-from-nothing situation.

SB: Yeah. So your relationship with time and money is really what informed so much of your recipe-building, I would say.

AR: Absolutely. Yeah. I think working for yourself is, speaking of the time aspect, you really sort of think… I was talking with somebody the other day who just recently left their magazine job and went more freelance, and they’re like, “I feel like I have to say yes to every job that I get, and now I have no time. I’m busier than I’ve ever been.” Because you feel like if you say no, they’re going to get someone else, and then you’re going to never work again.

That sort of hustle also kind of stays with you forever. What I’m realizing now at 40, which I thought, eight years ago, would not be the case, is that I’m still working so hard, because I’m worried that if I don’t, it’ll all disappear. I stay busy and, if there’s a lull in my schedule, a lull in my projects, I’m like, “Let’s start something new. Let’s do something new.” The busyness is all self-created. It’s totally wild. No one’s asking for any of the things that I’m doing. No one’s like, “I’m begging you to make a tomato sauce.” Or, “I’m begging you to open a grocery store.” Nobody’s asked for this. This is all stuff that I create for myself. And I’m like, “I’m so busy.” So yeah, it’s funny how that all informs one another. It’s like, I didn’t have the money; now I don’t have the time.

SB: What would you say is your approach to time and—I kind of cringe to say the phrase, but—time management?

AR: I don’t know that phrase. Let’s put it that way. That is unfamiliar to me. [Laughter]

SB: Well, I mean, I’m asking this also because we’ve been talking about your recipe-building and your cookbooks, but you also have this email newsletter, refreshingly and simply called A Newsletter.

AR: Yes, thank you.

SB: Your YouTube show, Home Movies; your Solicited Advice podcast; and this First Bloom grocery store you opened upstate. I mean, you do a lot. How do you keep it all together?

AR: Barely, with a thread. With a tiny little thread. I have a wonderful chief of staff. Her name is Narni [Summerall]. She does so much. and she works really hard and she’s wonderful and she makes sure that I do my job—or she tries, anyway, to make sure that I do my job. That’s really helpful. I think leveling up and having somebody that is great at their job to help me do mine has been really important. But otherwise, I don’t know. A lot of things don’t get done. I think learning to be okay with that in the day to day, being like, this isn’t going to happen today. It’s going to have to wait until tomorrow. The answer is yes. Because of the work that I do, it’s like, can this Instagram post wait till tomorrow? It can. It’s totally fine. I’m not doing surgery.

Whereas, a few years ago, I’d be like, “Well, it has to happen on Thursday.” Well, it actually doesn’t and it’s fine. Learning to shuffle things around so that I feel less stressed so the work is actually better, feels so much better to me. But otherwise, time management eludes me, and I’ve never been good at it. I am an adult woman who lives with ADHD, a late-in-life diagnosis. It explains a lot about the way that I approach time management, and it is something, well, it’s something that I struggle with and it’s shocking to me that I’ve gotten as far as I have in my career, given how bad I am at it. Let’s put it that way.

SB: Well, I should say here that you showed up thirty minutes early to the interview.

AR: It was a mistake.

SB: Which I actually liked, though normally it’s like, “Oh, they’re thirty minutes late.”

AR: I’m always thirty minutes late, constantly. This was—let it be known, whatever date this is, lord knows—it was the first time I’ve ever been early for anything. And let’s just say it can be done. You just have to tell me. I have to think that the thing starts thirty minutes before it does. [Laughter]

SB: I was looking at, or trying to find sort of time references across your work, and there was an Instagram post you did about a year ago, on August 22, 2024, and you wrote, “Damn, do I love spending my precious sweet time making things that feel long-lasting and impactful.” You later add in the same post, “I’m not good at TikTok, and have an increasingly low tolerance for content created for the internet gaze. But I love making books and I think I’m pretty good at it.” This is more of a bookmaking question, but I think there’s something really beautiful about making tangible things in this ephemeral digital content, screen-filled age. I mean, you and I, we’re both 40. We both grew up with this short-on-time internet mindset, and I feel like making things that are tangible, physical, there’s such a beauty in that in this time.

AR: I really think so. It’s so hard to feel like the old person in the room and to be like, “Books are important.” I really think that they are. We are sitting in a room surrounded by them. It really is a different thing than the internet. They’re not going to replace the internet, and I don’t think the internet is going to replace books. I think that [books and the internet] can coexist, and I think that they should coexist. They are objects; they are permanent. Again, I think of them as a time capsule, weirdly. I always have. Even in pre-internet culture, I’ve always thought that. I thought that in the context of—I helped some friends of mine write a cookbook a few years ago, and they were like, “How am I supposed to write a book that says who I am as a chef? Because who I am as a chef is always evolving. I’m supposed to write a book?” It was a fine book, actually. I was like, well, you kind of have to think of it as a time capsule.

You have to be like, well, this is who I am right now, and when you look back on this book, you’re like, yeah, this book was published in 2018 or whatever, and, in 2018, this is who we were as chefs and as a restaurant. That’s beautiful, and it doesn’t have to define you forever, and that’s great. Then you can make another book if you want. That’s kind of how I like to think of things. 

That said, I think that there are those types of books and then there are other types of books that I view as sort of timeless, that are things that you reach for constantly, that are things that you pass down to people that are like, this is going to serve you well forever. It’s not unlike wardrobe or how we dress. It’s like, this is a pair of jeans or a jacket or whatever, shoes, bag that is going to take you from this season to this season, from this age to this age, this decade to this decade. Then there’s stuff where you’re like, wow, I wore the hell out of this for my twenties and never again or whatever. I think that books continue to serve a multitude of purposes.

SB: What are some of those books for you, the timeless ones? What are the books that you would pass down to your son or your grandkid or the next generation?

AR: It’s weird, because I have a son, and I am grateful for that. I was worried about having a daughter, because I have a complicated relationship with my mother. All of the books that I have been given or give as gifts, like trading with friends specifically have all been among women and they’re very women-focused and about the woman experience. And I’m like, what books will I give my son?

Not to say they’re all super feminine-focused, but I think that there are some books that I would give him to help him understand why I do what I do. The Tenth Muse, by Judith Jones, who was Julia Child’s editor. Home Cooking, by Laurie Colwin, probably, I’d probably give him an Anthony Bourdain book, although I don’t know which one. Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter. I’d give him a collection wrapped in a sweet little ribbon and say, “Read these at some point over the next few years to better understand me and what I was like when I was younger and why I chose the career that I did.” I think that’s important. As I’ve become a parent, I think doing that sort of thing to remember who I am now so that I can tell him when he’s older feels important. I think doing that through books feels like a great way to do that.

SB: Well, and Something From Nothing, it’s not literally a pregnancy book, but you were pregnant while working on the book.

AR: I was, yeah, I was pregnant and then very freshly postpartum. He came a month early and I was supposed to be done with the book before he came, but he came early, and then I had to finish it after he was here. It was very disorienting, because I had sort of thought of this book as the last thing I would do before I had a baby. I’d be like, this is marking a chapter-ender. In a way, [it was] the beginning of a new era for me, but also the end of an old one. Then through just a series of events, it sort of decidedly became the beginning of a new one because of the way that it was finished in this very new chapter for me.

SB: Well, here I should say this book is quite different from your previous three, aesthetically and recipe-wise. [Your introduction describes it as] “adult. Mature, even.” How do you see that maturation? Or what about this book feels more adult to you?

AR: It’s been six years since Nothing Fancy came out. I was 32 when I wrote Dining In, 31, 32. Then I was 34, 35 when I was writing Nothing Fancy and it came out. And now I’m 40. I think that there’s a lot that happens between 34 and 40. A lot that happens between 32 and 40 and 31 and 40. I think that it’s very strange to come of age in front of people and have yourself judged against previous versions of yourself. And other people perceive that and be like, “Oh, well, this is who I know you as. You are forever young. You’re blond, you have short hair, and you party and you look like this, and you put beer in the bathtub and you have people over all the time, and that’s Alison.” And that was me and that still is sometimes. But more often than not, it’s not me right now. To grow out of that, rather than pretend that that’s still me and in public and then in private be who I am, I can’t imagine doing that. That feels exhausting. So, instead of doing that, I’ve chosen to just be myself a hundred percent of the time, both publicly and privately, which I’ve always done, but now I run the risk of people being like, “Oh, I don’t like this one.”

Someone the other day commented on my Instagram that they found me so boring now, and I was like, “Huh?” I was like, “Am I boring? I might be.” I was like, “Well, if I’m so boring, why am I so tired all the time?” I’m exhausted. [Laughter] 

It’s hard to age or mature into a different person, but I think that, food-wise, it just… I’m referring to the adult and maturation as I think because the food is a little bit quieter because it’s a bit more simple, because there is something a bit more mature about saying this doesn’t need to be that complicated. It’s not laziness, and it’s not lack of creativity. It’s like, you know what? I’ve been around the block. I’ve been cooking for twenty years, and I know all the ways to do this thing, and guess what? I think this is actually the most delicious or this is my favorite. You can put yogurt on it. You can fry this thing and crisp up this thing and put it on a toast or do whatever the hell you want. But for me? This is the most delicious, and I can say that because I’m 40. That’s maturity, I think: to be more quiet and to be okay with that.

SB: Well, I was showing my wife the cookbook before, earlier this morning, and I was like, “I cannot wait to cook all of these.”

AR: Oh, good. I’m so glad.

SB: It’s interesting, because your previous cookbooks, with respect to them, I wasn’t always cooking everything in them. I feel like I could literally and want to make every single recipe in this book.

AR: Tonight.

SB: Yeah.

AR: I feel that way, too. I think of all my books, this is—God, I hate myself for saying this—I feel like this is the most classic, it’s the most instant classic for me, partly because it already has in the book some of my more well-known recipes. It’s so hard to know what is known already, because things have existed on the internet before. Some people are like, “Oh, yeah, you’re shallot pasta girl.” They have no idea who I am, but they know what shallot pasta is, and that’s the only thing they know me for. I’m like, “Oh, my God, yes, that’s me; I’m the shallot pasta girl.” Other people are like, “I’ve cooked everything you’ve ever published, every newsletter recipe, every YouTube recipe.” And I’m like, “Great. You’re going to maybe find a few familiar friends in this book, but you can’t assume that everyone has seen everything you do.”

I think most people probably fall somewhere in the middle. They’re like, “Yeah, I know your crushed-olive chicken and your potato leek soup and your shallot pasta.” I’m like, “Great. But there’s a ton of other new recipes in the book, obviously. But I think, for me, this is the quintessential me—at least today. I am very proud of the other books as well, and I think that if you were to put all the recipes together and you were to be like, “What book does this belong in?” You could kind of mix and match some of these recipes. You definitely could cook for people if you were having them over. For me, this book definitely feels more like a book you keep inside and at home and you’re cooking it for yourself for two to four people. Maybe even for lunch, maybe make ahead. It’s more homey. It’s more cozy; it’s an indoor book.

SB: Well, unlike your previous books, which had this sort of white-framed aesthetic and cover.

AR: Yeah. Boy, are people pissed. Oh my God.

SB: This one’s green. It has a decidedly more upstate bent, I would say, which probably is reflective of the fact that you spent a lot of Covid in the country.

AR: By upstate, Spencer means I used a serif font. Yes, I did. I used a serif font because you zig, I zag. You know what I mean? I used a sans serif font for dining in and a white border, because all the other books had a serif font with no border. And I was like, “I’m going to make a border with a serif font,” so now all the books look like that. Now I’m like, okay, well now I’m going to use a serif font and make it green. I’m feeling like the party is crowded and I have to leave the party. You know what I mean?

SB: Yeah, totally. 

AR: I get claustrophobic.

SB: I like the approach to photography in this book, too.

AR: Thank you.

SB: The previous books really felt like a thirtysomething party. Which they were.

AR: Yeah, they really were.

SB: This one feels more like you’re quite literally tucking in at home.

AR: And we did; we were.

SB: There are photos… I love the “Chicken Noodle Soup with Lots of Lemon” dish, photographed on a tray on a bed.

AR: My bed.

SB: Plush white sheets, and it feels like it’s about everyday life. The “French Onion Beans and Greens” dish, it’s like you’re digging into this bowl.

AR: I’m super-pregnant.

SB: The last page of the book, maybe this is giving it away, but I feel like we should share it with the listeners. You’re under the sheets of your bed and you’re looking intently at the camera, about to dig into a “Carbonara for Two.”

AR: And it was for two, yeah. 

I’m very intentional with how I shoot each book. I want them to be genuinely reflective of the soul of the book, from the title to the recipes inside of it, to the photography, to the props: everything. Chris Bernabeo, who photographed it, is super talented with film. I’d say it’s like fifty percent film, maybe a little bit more, which is so fun to shoot on because obviously you can set up a shot with digital, but then you take the film shot and you don’t know what it’s going to look like. Almost always, they were my favorite. We’d have an option of digital and film and it’s like, oh, the film is just so much better. On the pages of the book, it’s grainy and it’s imperfect.

It feels to me so refreshing to see that in a cookbook where now everything is so polished and perfect within an inch of its life. For me, I’m just like, let’s mess it up. Let’s tousle it. Let’s just rough it up, because that is life and food. There’s nothing more natural and there’s nothing more everyday—and, frankly, boring—than food sometimes. That’s okay. Not everything has to be this explosive thing. This book really reflects that. We shot the whole book in my house. We [used] a very small team. Most of the plates and the bowls and the dishes are my plates, bowls and dishes. All the food I made with my hands—it just, it feels like it’s a tucking-in, cozy home experience, because that’s what it was. I’m glad that that feels that way, because that’s the intention.

SB: While writing this book, you opened the grocery store that I mentioned earlier, called First Bloom, and this was a longtime dream of yours, to open a grocery store. How did you come to choose this location and this concept and timing? What led you all to it?

AR: The timing was really crazy. I opened the grocery store and got married a week apart. What? [Laughter] Not intentionally in terms of timing, but that’s just how it happened. In the same way of [writing] this book and having the baby, it’s just like things have a way of congregating. I feel like it happens to a lot of people this way where you’re just like, yeah, it all happened at once. 

During the pandemic, some friends and I rented a house in the area, Delaware County, which is in the Western Catskills, about an hour and twenty minutes west of Hudson, if you’re familiar. And I had spent a lot of time in this area previously for many, many years. I actually shot part of Dining In there, in Bovina, and had written most of Nothing Fancy up there. I have some friends, Sara and Sohail [Zandi], who own Brushland Eating House, and they have a ton of Airbnbs in the area, and I would stay there and do all my writing.

So, I was pretty familiar with the area, I really fell in love with it. It’s so beautiful, just very wild-feeling in a way that other parts of upstate didn’t to me. So some friends and I rented a house, and the four of us were just constantly on Zillow. We’re just like, “Should we all live here? Should we all move here?” Of course, everyone during the pandemic, when you get out of wherever it is that you’re living, you enter this fantasy world of “We’re leaving the city and we’re all going to move upstate. We’re all going to move to the country, and this is our life now.” No one knew what was going on, if we were ever returning to normal life. I saw that this restaurant that I had gone to before, Table on Ten, was for sale. It was down the road from where we were staying.

I was like, “I’m going to go look at it. I can’t believe it’s for sale, this pizza restaurant.” It was an old house that used to be an apothecary that was turned back into a house that was a general store and turned back into a house, then a pizza restaurant, Airbnb. I went and looked at it and it was the only thing I could afford, because it had been on the market for a minute, and no one wanted to buy a pizza restaurant, and it wasn’t quite a house. But for me, a single person who didn’t have a family was like, “Oh, I do want to open a grocery store. This could be perfect.” It kind of was ideal, and it was a totally ridiculous idea.

I remember on my birthday, my 38th birthday, 37th birthday, I said, “Am I buying Table on Ten?” My friend was like, “I think you have to.” I was like, “I think I have to.” And I did. I bought it. Several years later, two years later, I finally opened the grocery store, three years later. It took a long time because, famously, construction takes a while and costs money and figuring it all out. It ended up being the best location for it, and it kind of all came together and I love it.

SB: First Bloom, and then you have a kid—that’s funny.

AR: I mean, during that period of time, I met my husband and I was like, “I’m opening a grocery store next year?” The grocery store wasn’t even open, but I was in the middle of construction for it, so I was going upstate a lot. He would come with me and I’m like, “This is going to be a grocery store.” He’s like, “Okay.” And he kind of just went along with it. Then we got engaged, and then we started planning the wedding, and the store was supposed to open in May and obviously got pushed to the fall, and we had already had the wedding date planned. So yeah, it all kind of happened at the same time—it worked out.

SB: You’ve described it as “curated.” I know you don’t like that word, but in as much as you carefully select what’s on the shelves, what’s your process for choosing what to put in your store?

AR: It changes with seasonality. At the core of it, I think at the beginning it was, to me, what defines a well-stocked pantry? What is a necessity? You start there, so, okay, what do you need to make most recipes? I had an assistant at the time go through my recipes and my books and catalog the ingredients that I used in every single one and write them all down. I made sure that we had every ingredient that you would need, but it wasn’t—

SB: So you reverse-engineered your cookbooks into a grocery store. [Laughs]

AR: Yeah, basically. But they were all regular ingredients. I just knew that that was a good place to start, because I knew that I wouldn’t be forgetting anything. I knew that the recipes were well-rounded and would jog the memory. It would be like, okay, you can use apple cider vinegar or white wine vinegar. I knew that the ingredients listed would remind me that I should carry those things. Then from there you expand on, okay, well if you don’t need it, what do you want? Then it’s a “nice to have.” What’s a fun little treat? So it’s like the need, the want, the nice little treat. There’s tiers. Then there’s things that are local, that feel special. You go from there. I try not to carry anything that feels ultra trendy. I try not to carry anything that feels superfluous. I try not to carry anything that you can make yourself.

SB: Well, I love that you’ve called the grocery store your highest calling or your greatest purpose. I think we think about a grocery store, and it’s not like the sexiest subject to talk about or think about.

AR: Not to you maybe, but, oh boy, I will all day.

SB: But I think it is interesting that, for you, it’s so intimate and personal, the grocery-store experience.

AR: Yeah, [the grocery store is] where everything that I do starts. You cannot participate in what I do without it. I suppose that’s not true. You can get your groceries delivered, which I also do. In New York, I use Fresh Direct or whatever delivery service. Guilty as charged. But it’s not because I don’t love the grocery store. I do it because I have to, if I run out of time or I’m simply not able to get there. It’s a matter of convenience to me. Going to the grocery store is a pleasure.I like it, and it makes me better at my job. I like to see what’s out there. I like to know what’s going on. I like to be like, “Oh, leeks are sold this way.” So when I call for leeks in a recipe, I know how to call for them. Like, oh, it’s actually better to call for them by weight because those sizes are all over the place. You have to be in touch with what you’re writing about. Otherwise, how is that going to translate? If I never go to the grocery store and I never know what ingredients look like, that’s not going to work for recipes. So, I have to do a lot of on-the-ground reporting at grocery stores.

SB: I actually watched the video of you grocery shopping.

AR: Oh, I love it.

SB: You made this video at a grocery store [Food Bazaar] in Red Hook [in Brooklyn].

AR: Yeah. If it were up to me, that’s all I would do. I would just, my dream—

SB: It’s like unboxing

AR: One hundred percent. My dream is to, one day, if I ever moved to Park Slope, become a member at the Park Slope Food Coop, and my time spent there to, what is it? You have to…

SB: You work a certain number of days to get the…

AR: My job there would be to stand around and just give people advice on ingredients. They’d be like, “What do I do with these?” And I’d tell them, and that’s how I would do my service. So, if you’re listening, let me know. I would do it.

SB: Since we’re on the subject of the grocery store and grocery shopping, I wanted to ask about some of your favorite or most memorable grocery shopping experiences that you can think of from across time.

AR: I mean…

SB: I know you shoplifted vegetables.

AR: I shoplifted… I was going to say they’re all either incriminating or deeply traumatic. I had one, I had the classic childhood grab on to a stranger thinking it’s your parent moment. You’re small, you run away from your parent. You go and you grab their leg and you look up. It’s not your mom or not your dad. That’s a terrible moment, but it almost always happens in the grocery store. I have a really specific moment. My mom would always get trout at the fish counter, and she would always ask to get them butterflied with the heads off. There was some miscommunication one day where the guy didn’t take the heads off and my mom freaked out, whatever. I made fun of my mom for losing her mind at the fish guy. It was the first time my mom laughed at that, at me making fun of her, and it was a real breakthrough moment where we were all able to laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation. I really held on to that memory. That was maybe the first and last time that that ever happened, but very specific fish counter memory. Yeah, otherwise, a lot of stealing green beans and putting them in my pocket, which now, honestly, was that so bad?

SB: A taste test. [Laughs]

AR: It was so not done with the intent of anything nefarious.

SB: Yeah, you’re a kid eating vegetables.

AR: Exactly. I mean, we should all be so lucky. But ultimately, yes, stealing is wrong. I do not condone stealing.

SB: There’s something in Something From Nothing that I wanted to bring up, which is that you write about the concept of generational cookware, and I loved this. It’s like the opposite of this sort of throwaway culture or the constant feeling that we have to buy more things and new things, and it’s almost like dishware or cookware as an heirloom. Could you elucidate a bit on this generational cookware thing? What does it mean to you? I mean, I love this concept that my grandkid could one day have this style of Dutch oven that I’m cooking in.

AR: I think that people are really, and rightfully so, mindful of how they spend their money now. I think part of getting older is realizing, okay, it is sometimes better to spend the money on something than to buy something cheaper multiple times. Unfortunately, the way that we learn that is by buying something cheap multiple times. I have done that. I feel like we’ve all done that where you’re like, “I’m saving the money. Do I really need the expensive version of something?” Sometimes, the answer is no. Sometimes the cheapest version of something is the best version of something. Especially with ingredients, that’s often the case. Sometimes,the cheapest whatever is perfectly fine. You’ll never know the difference. Great. 

But with cookware specifically, I really do find a huge difference. I think that, speaking from experience, the things that I’ve spent the money on, they last forever. You buy them and never again, and you never think about it again.

Anything that you buy that you think you’re getting a deal on, especially in the cooking world, falls apart. It breaks, it chips, it rusts. It is not usable within two years. Now people are starting to see that, because a lot of these cookware companies came to prominence in the past few years, and a lot of people are like, “Wait, what? This didn’t work, or it doesn’t work, or it’s bad.” I think if you never cook and you just, you’re furnishing an Airbnb, whatever, it’s like, sure, I’m not going to suggest that you spend the money on a set of all-clads. But if you’re serious about cooking and you know that you cook a lot, think about it. You are putting this thing over the highest heat possible multiple times a week, and you’re scrubbing it with harsh soaps and you’re really beating the hell out of this thing. It really should be durable.

I have no vested interest—or, nobody is lining my pockets. I’m not in bed with any of these companies. It’s really just that I care about the process of buying something once and never again. I think with cookware, because it can be expensive, but the reason cookware’s expensive is because the materials are well made. But yeah, imagine giving somebody a pot. 

When I go to flea markets and stuff, I do buy old cast iron and I do buy old pots, and I think that’s cool. Guess what? You’ll never find any of these new pots that are coming on the market now at a flea market in forty years. They won’t last. Again, it’s extremely old person of me to be like, they don’t make them like they used to, but they don’t. There is something to be said for that.

SB: I think a pan is just a metaphor for everything else in society.

AR: I know, It really is. It’s such a soapbox thing that I feel deeply passionate about, and people will be like, “Oh, my thing didn’t work out,” or, “I put it in the oven overnight and it burned.” I’m like, well, that’s because the pan that you’re using is so thin and flimsy and it doesn’t have a seal because it’s not well made and it’s not made of the same material. I want you to have good things.

SB: Yeah. We had a guest on the show, Glenn Adamson, years ago, who published a book called Fewer, Better Things. I feel like that’s the Alison Roman M.O., even from a cooking perspective.

AR: A hundred percent.

SB: Fewer, better ingredients, and they don’t have to be the fanciest, but just the right ones.

AR: Just the right ones and not all the time.

SB: So, turning to your childhood, you tell the story of matzo ball soup, and I was hoping you could share that here, because I thought it was so beautiful. It’s this very tender story about the relationship between food and feeling cared for.

AR: People will often ask, what’s your first food memory? I feel like the answer has probably varied, because I have a few, but definitely a reoccurring one. I got strep throat a lot as a kid, and we lived right by this deli called Solley’s, which is now closed. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley in L.A. Solley’s was where my grandfather used to go every morning, and he sat at the same table, with the same group of guys, and they sat and they yapped. That was what they did. Occasionally, my dad would have to drop me off there or something. He was sort of like de facto childcare. My grandparents watched me a lot in between if I was sick or if my parents couldn’t take care of me or school was out or something. So, I spent a lot of time at this deli. I already had this emotional connection to it, and I feel like I’d written about it before with matzo brei or something like that, but it was close to my house. Every time I got sick, we would get matzo ball soup from this specific deli. I don’t even know if it was that good, so not my style of matzo ball soup. It was one giant massive matzo ball and one carrot floating around, and maybe even a noodle, I’m not sure. But even still, it was something that I associated with the thing that I got when I was sick, which meant I would not be sick anymore. It meant that help was on the way, in a way.

My grandfather, he called it Jewish penicillin, which I thought was clever until I realized that any Jewish person calls it that. It’s just what it’s called. It sort of started to be synonymous with comfort and care. I don’t think, obviously, I realized that as a child, but as an adult, I think I did. It was just my favorite food. I think it’s undeniably a perfect food when made well, and whether or not you’ve had it before, whether or not you’re Jewish or not, it’s like big, beautiful chicken-fat dumplings in a broth. It’s perfect.

I don’t put carrots in mine. It’s very celery-forward, lots of chives. It’s delicious. You can finish it with lemon or not, whatever. Anyway, in sort of like a full-circle moment, my now-husband, who famously does not cook—he has never cooked a day in his life before he met me. He just simply has no interest in the task, loves to eat, appreciates restaurants, he appreciates what I do, is very impressed with me, but does not cook himself. When he proposed to me, he proposed by making me matzo ball soup, which I thought was the ultimate expression of love for me. It was very, very emotional and very, very sweet, and I have to say it was perfect. And yes, he did use my recipe.

SB: [Laughs] I love that. Full circle.

AR: Yeah.

SB: I mean, what other…

AR: The story in the book is more eloquent than what I just did, but you can read the book.

SB: Yeah, exactly, exactly.

AR: It’s short. It’s like half a page.

SB: Yeah, well, and there are so many other food memories that I’m sure we could get into. One that made me laugh was your grandmother’s love of crudité.

AR: She also famously did not cook, but she did love to carve elaborate shapes and animals and flowers and plants out of vegetables. She was doing that in the sixties, which I think was very popular then as entertaining and impressing guests and doing all that stuff, even if you weren’t cooking.The emphasis was on entertaining versus cooking, and she was really in that zone.

SB: Which is interesting, because you’ve pretty famously said that you’re anti-entertaining.

AR: [Laughs] Yeah, it’s not entertaining, it’s having people over. But my grandmother was more in the entertaining, less having-people-over category, for sure. Actually,  the older I’ve gotten, the more entertaining-forward my gatherings have gotten.

SB: Well, not to make it all Freudian… but I was interested to learn that your father had worked as a salesman and your mother as a court reporter, and I was like, these are really interesting jobs when thinking about what you do, and I only say this because…

AR: Wow, go on.

SB: This is probably reaching, whatever. You do a very good job pitching what it is you do, and making it—there’s a sort of sales aspect, but what you’re selling is your love of cooking and food. Maybe the court reporter one’s a bit of a stretch, but to be a good court reporter requires real analytical skills, deep listening, a certain intensity, and a willingness to kind of push through boredom in a way. Not boredom necessarily, but tenacity. Long hours waiting.

AR: Yeah, my mom was a really hard worker. Yeah, I see what you’re saying.

SB: Yeah.

AR: I’ll go there.

SB: There’s a little stew there of something.

[Laughter]

AR: Yeah, there’s something there. Yeah, there’s a “something from nothing” there.

SB: When did you decide that you wanted to be a cook?

AR: Professionally? When I was 19.

SB: That’s when you left home. You left college, you’re like, “I’m going to go do this.”

AR: I was like, “I’m going to go to culinary school” when I was 19 and I knocked on the back door of a restaurant and was like, “I need advice from—,” I mean, now telling the story, it sounds so nuts—

SB: You’re banging…

AR: On the back door, literally. But it actually was my life and it actually happened. Again, it’s such a long story, but I had eaten at this restaurant a lot with my then boyfriend whose parents would pay for us to eat at this restaurant. It was a nice restaurant, and he was really—

SB: Michelin-starred, right?

AR: Yes. He was really into food, I was really into food, and his parents would bankroll this experience for us. We were very lucky, and I decided I was going to go to culinary school but, in order to do so, I needed a job while I was in culinary school to help pay for the culinary school. So I knocked on the back door of this restaurant to ask to speak with the chef. The pastry chef answered the door instead, and he said, “The chef is not here, but I’m happy to talk to you.” He said, “Well, why don’t you come work for me? Basically, we opened a bakery across the street. You can see if you like it.” I’m paraphrasing here. You can see if you like it, because most people who go to culinary school end up hating it and don’t want to work in the industry, and I’ll save you forty-five thousand dollars. I said, “Sounds great.” 

So, he hired me. I knew absolutely nothing, but I was like, I love it. I was bad at it, but I loved it, and I pushed through and decided that that’s what I was going to do, and I knew I was going to continue to do it until I didn’t want to do it anymore. I wasn’t like, this is the rest of my life. It was sort of just like, I’m 19, what the hell do I know? I was going to do it until I didn’t want to do it anymore. I’m still doing it.

SB: You spent a couple years there and then you went up to San Francisco for three years, right?

AR: Yeah, three or four years.

SB: Then here to New York, where you landed at Milk Bar. It’s interesting, it was like Milk Bar was another one of these, I would say on some level, most of what you do could be classified as “comfort food.” Milk Bar was certainly rooted in that idea of baking and also having fun.

AR: For sure. It was so different for me. I had come from a very fine dining world in San Francisco and in L.A. It was very produce-driven, fine dining, extremely polished and delicate, and high-end, highbrow, and Milk Bar was sort of the exact opposite of that.  It was a different muscle that I had never flexed before. And it was interesting for me; it was a total change of scenery. But what I really loved about it was that it was a very unique, singular perspective. It was told through the lens of one person, and it was Christina Tosi, and it was her brainchild and her vision, and it was very clear, and I liked that. I liked that there was a clear directive. It was like, okay, well, we know what it is, and this is what it is. That was exciting. It was a really exciting time to be there. It was in the nascent sort of stages, and it was like— When you’re building something, it’s full of so much possibility and it’s so chaotic and it’s so energetic and it’s intense, but it was fun.

SB: So it’s sort of a way of seeing what became of your own future, in a way. You have your own platform, you go on to create your own platform. I’m sure that experience was informative on some level.

AR: Yeah, absolutely. I think working for anyone that I’d worked for informed me.

SB: You came of age with the internet, of course, and after these restaurants, you entered that culture through Bon Appétit.

AR: Yeah.

SB: Tell me about that time. What stands out to you from your Bon Appétit years?

AR: That also was a very weird place and time to come of age “with the internet,” because the website existed, but it wasn’t prioritized, and it was sort of treated like a second-class citizen. It was like, ugh, like the website. If you worked for the website, it meant you weren’t good enough to work for print. If you wrote something and no one liked it, it would go to the website. It was sort of just like, eh, put it on the web. I think that to have such incredible change happen in such a short period of time, culturally is mind-blowing. 

When I started at Bon Appétit, I had no editorial experience. I knew that I wanted to be a writer before. In high school, I was like, “Oh, I’m going to be a writer,” and then bailed on that immediately, and I never thought that I would find my way back to that, because I was so immersed in food and cooking, and it was the first time that I thought, maybe I can do both. I saw for the first time a world in which both things were an option to me. Maybe. They didn’t let me write for a long time. I think I was there for about two years before I was able to get a byline. But once I started doing that there, I knew that that’s what I wanted to do. I was like, “Well, I need both in my life, and I want to do both.”

Granted, at the time, I’m putting “writing” in quotation marks, because I wasn’t even really writing to my potential. It was bad. I was not a very good writer, probably. I was not being myself necessarily. I was trying to fit into a mold or be writing as if I were a magazine writer. It took me a while to find my voice, I think. Once I did, there, I had a much better time and found more success. It was wild. I remember there was a time where, oh, we have an Instagram account now. Bon Appétit has an Instagram account. When I started, there wasn’t one.

SB: Oh, wow.

AR: How wild is that to think that we just existed as a magazine and there were eight other food magazines, and we’d be like, oh, Real Simple put this on their cover. That means we can’t put that on our cover. We had other food magazines to be cognizant of and think about.

SB: This is just like thirteen, fourteen years ago.

AR: Yeah.

SB: It’s crazy.

AR: You could work there and people would leave, “Oh, they took a job at Food & Wine.” It was such a different universe, and now it just is completely something else.

SB: So, you go on to The New York Times, and there, I think, is really when your notoriety as a recipe-maker started to flourish. You had “the cookies” and “the stew”—the “thes.”

AR: Yeah.

SB: Now, in hindsight, what do you see as the tipping point or the moment where Alison Roman went mainstream?

AR: Dining In came out in 2017, and that was helpful. It was my first cookbook, and, unless you really were a subscriber to Bon Appétit, you didn’t really know who I was. So, it was a debut book and it did well, and that was where the cookies were born. So that was really helpful I think in getting… That was sort of a weird phenomenon. It was the first time I think that a singular recipe, especially one from a book “went viral.” 

There was a brief period when I worked at BuzzFeed right after I left Bon Appétit. I was no stranger to the concept of viral recipes, but I had associated that concept with food that I didn’t want to cook or make or watch or look at. To have something that I made be called a “viral recipe,” I was like, I don’t know that that’s true, but it was in a different way I thought, I was like, “No, no, this is different.” Because people are actually making these cookies and they’re actually talking about it, and people love to write about it.

They were like, “Why are these popular? Why, why, why?” People were just obsessed with dissecting why they were popular. And I mean, they’re good. They taste really good. The cookies taste good, and the recipe works. I think that is it. At the time, I was showing people, look, this is what it looks like when you make it and when you make it and when you make it. At the time, nobody was doing that because who else is insane enough to screenshot every single person’s Instagram story and then make a story about it, which is what you had to do because you couldn’t repost.

Again, I sound a thousand years old, but I mean, that’s what you had to do. But it was a great marketing tool—so great that now, obviously, Instagram has made it a part of their whole platform. I mean, I don’t think that that’s why, obviously, and I think that from there then The New York Times was like, “Oh, you should write some recipes for us.” Then I got a column around the same time Nothing Fancy came out. It all started happening around the same time.

SB: Then, in 2018, you had the stew.

AR: Was it 2018?

SB: I think so.

AR: Okay, yeah. Were we ever so young?

SB: That hashtag, #the stew, and a very delicious recipe I’m sure many of our listeners have made many, many times, but its popularity also brought about this sort of, I don’t know, backlash I guess you could say, or accusations of cultural appropriation. You went through this whole thing where you ended up adding some language to The New York Times site. We don’t need to rehash the whole thing, but I guess I wanted to ask you about that moment. I’m sure at that point you were like, I’m just making cookbooks or recipes, and then all of a sudden you’re coming to represent something much larger than yourself.

AR: Yes, very much so. I think that that’s what comes with popularity, and I think that there’s ultimately a responsibility for a publication, but I bore the brunt as an individual.

SB: Yeah. Well, then Slate had this article, “Is the Stew Actually That Good?”

AR: I know. Oh, my God, those are my favorite. They did that with the cookies, too, Food52 I think was like, “Are The Cookies Even Good?” or whatever. I’m like, honestly, yeah, and honestly, the stew is good, but also the thing about that is that I never named these recipes “The Cookies” and “The Stew.” The people did.

SB: Yeah. Sorry, I should have been clear about that. [Laughs]

AR: Yeah. I’m not out here being like the cook— I think that—

SB: Your recipes became hashtags.

AR: The recipes became hashtags.

SB: You didn’t make them that.

AR: I didn’t do that. I think people would pay money to have a recipe be that successful. I didn’t make that happen. If I could make that happen, don’t you think I would do that all the time?

SB: Mm-hmm.

AR: I don’t know when that’s going to happen, and I don’t know how to make that happen intentionally. I think that that happened because it was good and people liked it. It was cheap. It was vegan. It appealed to a wide range of people. It looked beautiful. The recipe worked. It looked like the photo. There are so many reasons why a recipe is good or works and in that particular moment, but I’m not out here saying, “This is the best stew ever made.” I just made a recipe the way I make all my other recipes, and I just put it into the world the way I put all my recipes into the world. For someone to be like, “Is it even that good? Why is everyone talking about it?” I’m like, I don’t know. It’s so hilarious to have your work be picked apart like that just because other people like it. But I remember that really bothered me. Obviously, it still bothers me. I’ve forgotten about it, but thanks for bringing it up. I’m just kidding. No, I’m over it.

[Laughter]

SB: I also think that it probably was written by a man.

AR: It was written by a man [J. Bryan Lowder].

SB: If you were a male chef, that never would’ve been a question.

AR: Absolutely not. There’s about a million things in my career that would’ve not happened to me if I were a man.

SB: Well, another thing I should bring up, which connects to— This was your next bout of what would be a mini version of “cancellation,” I’ll call it. The big one that came a few years later was this interview with this newsletter called The New Consumer. I guess you could call it disastrous. It was a series of things you said that probably were misspoken, but I also feel like it came at this time—and this is an important thing to bring up now, because I think we’re all thinking about it—Thomas Chatterton Williams now has this book out [Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse] about what he calls the “Great Awokening” of 2020. We’re all stuck at home. There are all these different things happening in society and culture overlapping, and this interview in a Substack newsletter that probably would’ve been read by a few hundred people caught wildfire, basically. We don’t need to go into all the details, but you’ve described it as this dark time, and I was thinking about all the flourishing that’s happened since. But I guess just focusing on those few months and that intense period…

AR: Oh, the dark time?

SB: Yeah, the dark time. How do you think about that now? I mean, it’s been about five years.

AR: Still very dark. Yeah. There’s no part of me that doesn’t think of it as the darkest and worst time of my life.

SB: Yeah. I mean, you’re still very online, but you were very—

AR: Oh, I’m way less online now.

SB: Yeah, you were very online and we all were. We were all stuck at home looking at our screens.

AR: It was the only place we were. We were only online. No one was anywhere else.

SB: I was trying to think about how I wanted to talk about this, because it’s like, it’s been written about and talked about so much, but I think what hasn’t been said is that we were all looking for things to pay attention to, we were bored. Everyone’s stuck at home, kind of bored, and you got made an example of.

AR: A hundred percent. I think in my life, I’ve been the beneficiary of so many right place, right time [moments], and I think one very specific time, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it doesn’t change. I said recently—somebody else asked me about it, and I was like, yeah, looking back, you say something stupid and you’re like, “Oh, shit, I shouldn’t have said that. That was so dumb. Like, God, I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean it that way. Yeah, no, no, I’m so sorry, oh, okay, we can move on.” But to not be able to move on…

SB: Yeah. I mean, you also gave it space. You went from being super online to, I think it was seventeen days or something where you just went…

AR: Someone paid attention. I don’t know how long it was, but yeah, I think that there’s no playbook on how to come back from something like that or how to recover from something like that. Interestingly enough, several people who that subsequently happened to or a version of that happened to all reached out to me to be like, “How did you do it?” I’m like, “Don’t ask me. I don’t know what I’m doing.” We’re different, and I don’t know what happened to you, but people came to me because I was the first person it happened to. I was the first domino to fall. And I’m like, “Oh, God, am I the person that you’re asking for advice?”

SB: I think the reality is you weren’t the first at all, but you were among the first in a pandemic, which hadn’t happened in a hundred years. Right?

AR: Exactly. I was the first in that season, in that very specific season where it really started.

SB: That Covid spring.

AR: Yes.

SB: Well, I’ve been watching the Amanda Knox [Hulu show, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox]—

AR: Press tour?

SB: Biopic or whatever we want to call it.

AR: Yeah, me too.

SB: I was thinking about that in the context of this. I’m like, man—

AR: Oh, God, what?

SB: She had it real bad, right? But here’s another case of somebody being totally manipulated by the media, and the media just trying to carve this narrative.

AR: It’s like, “Is the stew even that good?” You know what I mean? It’s that. It’s like, oh, everyone likes this thing. Well, is it even that good? We still see it happen today, and I just read something related, but unrelated. Whatever, it’s too long of a story. I’m not going to get into it. We see this happen all the time where… Here’s what I’ll say. A few weeks before that happened, I said to somebody—this is either because I’m a witch or because I just have witnessed enough cultural examples of this, but—I said to somebody out loud, they were like, “How are you? How are you doing?” I said, “I’m good. I’m really good. But I’m worried, because I feel like it’s too good.” I said, “Something’s going to happen.”

I was doing so many podcasts, I was doing so many interviews, I was getting so much good press. Everyone was writing about me. It was like Alison Roman shallot pasta, bucatini, Zoom class. I was like, “I’m flying too high.” And I knew it. I knew that people were going to be like, “No.” And granted, it was my own undoing, for the most part, but I kind of knew it. I kind of was like, no one can fly this high. 

SB: I think what you did right, though, that not everyone does, is admitted you were wrong, and immediately, and were like, “I’m really sorry I said that.”

AR: Of course. I think the thing that being a public person doesn’t allow for is nuance or being human. That’s what I’ve built my entire career on, is being an imperfect human and making mistakes and being myself. To be a human and to make a mistake and be myself. A lot of people were like, “Yeah, okay.” A lot of people were like, “No, unforgivable. You’re bad.” You’re like, okay.

SB: I mean, you were bold enough to go on Ziwe, and she said, “I actually think that you wrote one of the best apologies in white-people apology tours.” So, I think at the end of the day, it is knowing when you’re wrong and knowing how to move forward through that.

AR: Yeah. I mean, I think people assumed that I had a team behind me or that there was some sort of press machine, and there wasn’t, and it wasn’t. I also was so not, whatever… I wasn’t really prepared to talk about this. I still don’t know how to talk about it. It’s very complicated, obviously.

SB: Well, through that or in the aftermath of that, you kept going. Now you have a book and a husband and a kid and a grocery store. I feel like it is very much a before-and-after moment. So how are you feeling about this after?

AR: Yeah, I think the only way through it is through it. That goes for anything that happens to you that you’d rather not do or live through again. It’s like, okay, well what are you going to do? Disappear for forever? No. You continue being yourself and making the work you make and people will see that. I think I’m not a different person than I was. I am still doing what I did and I’m still here. Of course there’s an evolution, whether or not something like that had happened, whether or not whatever. I think it’s like we’re all different from five years ago. I think a lot of people, regardless, are changed from 2020, I think regardless of 2020. I think a lot of people are different from eight years ago… I don’t know.

Time, again, to talk about time. It changes people in such a significant way, but it is not apparent until you have enough of it. The distance, the day-to-day is so whatever, you’re not like, “Oh, yesterday I’m different than today.” But five years… How do you talk about it? How do you quantify it? Especially as an adult. Now I’m watching a baby, and five months ago he was three months old, and three months to eight months is so significant. But five months ago, I was pretty much the same person. It’s so interesting now to think about the weird passing of time in that way and being like, Oh, your life is so different. It’s like, yeah, my life is so radically different. I think, when I stop to think about it, it’s actually pretty shocking.

SB: Well, I thought we would end this interview—and I loved how you were beautifully talking about time, but—I thought we would end this interview with sort of a speed round, because you have so many affinities when it comes to food and dishes and I was just like, I want to hear what comes to mind for you when I mention different ingredients or dishes. Maybe use it as a time portal, a way of talking about an ingredient or a dish. So, let’s start with anchovies.

AR: Anchovy butter from [the now-defunct] Hamilton’s Grill [Room] in New Jersey.

SB: Olive oil?

AR: Greece, where I watched them press olive oil for the first time.

SB: Radishes with butter and salt?

AR: My grandma, who used to carve flowers out of radishes.

SB: Roast chicken.

AR: Oh gosh, I don’t know. Last week I made a really great roast chicken. It’s a very recent memory.

SB: Pizza?

AR: Pizza. There used to be a place on Second Avenue in the East Village. It was called South Brooklyn Pizza, but it was on Second Avenue in the East Village, and it was different from the one in Brooklyn, and they made the best pizza in the world and they closed several years ago. I think about it all the time. I used to go there a lot as a young twentysomething.

SB: Egg?

AR: Egg. Nothing. I got nothing.

SB: Well, you say six minutes is the perfect amount of time for an egg in your new book.

AR: Okay, I do say that.

SB: Which I love, because we’re here to talk time a little bit.

AR: I agree, it is. Six minutes is the perfect amount of time for an egg.

[Laughter]

SB: And I feel like we have to finish with dessert.

AR: Okay.

SB: So what would be a dessert that you would want to end on?

AR: What would be a dessert I’d want to end on? I feel like right now, we’re in the fall season, and people are baking a lot, and I feel like there are no desserts in this book, which is also different. Typically there’s fifteen desserts in a book. There’s none in there.

SB: You want Alison Roman desserts…

AR: There’s a whole book on it.

SB: Get the dessert book.

AR: Exactly. I feel like a galette—which is, you have your perfect pie crust, you fill it with fruit, you put some sugar on top, you fold up the edges, you bake it—is a very something-from-nothing style dessert. I have many galette recipes on the internet, and in my other books, so you can find them there. But I feel like for your time, and the effort, and the result, that’s it for me. Better than a pie, is what I’ll say. Pies take too long. I said it.

SB: [Laughs] Let’s end there. Thanks, Alison.

AR: Thank you.

This interview was recorded in The Slowdown’s New York City studio on Tuesday, September 30, 2025. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The episode was produced by Ramon Broza, Olivia Aylmer, Mimi Hannon, and Johnny Simon. Illustration by Paola Wiciak based on a photograph by Chris Bernabeo.