Unfiltered: Writer And Cook Alison Roman On Cooking, Content And Motherhood

Chatting to the American cookbook guru famous for her viral recipes …

When we meet at her publisher’s office in London, both of us fresh off flights from New York, she arrives in a red jumper, brown pencil skirt and leather boots, looking perfectly put together. She’s in London doing “three weeks of press in one week,” she says – squeezing in signings, events, a book launch and a photoshoot in a deli, all between jet lag, her baby’s naps and a few dinners out with friends.

One of the first things I ask Alison Roman (@alisonroman) is how she describes what she does.“I tell people I write cookbooks,” she says immediately. Not “author”, not “chef”, not “content creator”.

“To me, that says I’m a writer and I cook. Everything else – YouTube, the newsletter, all of it comes from that,” she explains. There’s a seriousness to the way she says it. She’s done the long, unglamorous graft: restaurant kitchens, test kitchens, all before The New York Times columns or the book deals. “I’ve trained the hard way,” she says. “It feels important that people know that.”

I can’t pretend I’m not a fan of Alison Roman. She’s been one of the women in food I’ve looked up to for most of my career. She’s doing something different: no cosy Aga, no apron, no “trad wife” performance or batch-cooking identity. It’s just her in her Brooklyn apartment, in a button down shirt, cooking simple food that feels like it could come out of any kitchen.

She’s one of the few women in food I can relate to who has a similar unfussy style of cooking to mine.

For anyone who might be unfamiliar: Alison Roman is an American cook, writer and bestselling cookbook author. She trained as a pastry chef, worked in restaurant kitchens, then moved into magazine test kitchens: first at Bon Appétit, where she became a senior editor, then Buzzfeed Food, and later The New York Times, where she became a recipe columnist in 2018. But it was her cookbooks and relaxed, relatable social media that pushed her into the spotlight. Her recipes are unfussy, doable and instantly recognisable as Alison’s. These days she writes the wildly popular newsletter, and hosts the YouTube series Home Movies. She is, essentially, the millennial food world’s Taylor Swift.

We end up talking about the strange space people like us occupy: somewhere between restaurants, old-school food media and Instagram. In the UK and Ireland there’s still a real divide between “proper” chefs and anyone with a cookbook and an online following.

Sponsored content inevitably comes up. Alison is blunt. “All my other stuff is free. The newsletter is free, the recipes are free, the videos are free. So you can either pay me five dollars a month for her newsletter, or you can watch a video of me making my bed for a brand. One of those things has to happen,” she explains. “We listen to ads on podcasts, so what’s the difference?”

Alison, like I expected, is honest about everything and unlike some other people I have interviewed, feels like she’s telling me everything with no filter which is the version we see in her videos and writing too: unfiltered.

Her new book, Something From Nothing, grows out of all of this: the graft, the pantry-based cooking, the no frills and the understanding that most people don’t live above a perfectly stocked Italian deli. Spending more time in Upstate New York, away from the convenience of city life, forced her to cook like most home cooks do – with whatever’s available. Old fennel, a half-jar of capers, leftover rice, a head of garlic. Real ingredients, slightly scruffy, that need rescuing. She compares it to style. “If you’ve got loads of money, it’s easy to look good. But if you don’t and you still look great – a good white shirt, the right trousers – that’s style. It’s what you do with it.”

A few years ago, before meeting her, I’d filed Alison away in my mind as the poster girl for the “happy, child-free, 30-something woman in food.” Then she got married, had a baby and … didn’t go anywhere. Even with the first-trimester nausea, the C-section recovery, the logistics of childcare and touring with a baby in tow, she has kept going. “It’s not that your ambition gets cut in half,” she says. “It’s that everything else grows by 50 per cent. You still have 100 per cent of you – there’s just more life in it now.”

I rarely meet people who have similar careers to me because my life is so specific, so Alison felt like an old friend. Our time quickly turned into over an hour which then led to dinner together at Bouchon Racinethe the night after.

She’s exactly who I thought she’d be. Funny, impossibly cool and refreshingly different.