Dining In

I had never heard of Alison Roman before this past month, when I kept seeing her referenced among key cooking resources during quarantine times. So I ordered her cookbook from my local independent bookstore. And it is... fine, but disappointing. A lot of the recipes are good but unnecessary - duplicative of what you'd find in Samin Nosrat or Ottolenghi books, but with a more minimalist Instagram aesthetic to the book design. Other recipes seem very basic - wow, let's cook asparagus in olive oil, salt, and pepper - or else unbalanced, with too much of some trendy ingredient (for instance, beets drowning in greek yogurt).

But beyond how unnecessary this book seems, I really didn't like Alison Roman's narrative persona. Starting the vegetables chapter with a photo of her, beautiful and blonde, walking through a produce market with the bold text, “When I was about seven or eight, I had a thing for supermarket shoplifting,” seemed to telegraph the entitled dilettante experimenting with others' livelihoods. And starting the chapter on fruit salads with the sentence, “Before you skip this chapter because of the idea of out-of-season berries, cubed melon, and halved grapes all tossed together really turns you off, just know that it turns me off, too,” also just came off as obnoxious and disdainful of how others eat.

My reaction to this book is of course heightened by her recent negative comments about other cookbook and lifestyle authors, but frankly her book already rubbed me the wrong way, and I think she should look inward before talking ill of others. Not saying I won't use any of her recipes in the future, but I've been reading a lot of cookbooks recently, and this one seems like the least necessary on my shelf.