Her Roman Empire

WITH HER FOURTH COOKBOOK, SOMETHING FROM NOTHING, ALISON ROMAN REFRAMES THE ‘LAZY’ HOME COOK AS THE MOST CREATIVE ONE

WORDS BY ALEXANDRA ENGLISH

PHOTOGRAPHED BY CHRIS BERNABEO

It hasn’t been all that long since Alison Roman released a cookbook, but her life looks remarkably different — unrecognisable, almost — since the last one. The Brooklyn-based cook and author fell in love, got married, had a baby, opened her own pantry store (First Bloom in upstate New York) and turned 40. All in just two-and-a-half years.

The one thing that hasn’t changed, though, is her approach to cooking. Roman’s personal brand has always been unfussy deliciousness, whether it’s a dessert-centric collection like her previous book, 2023’s Sweet Enough (“The most forgiving baking book ever,” she says), or an ode to raiding the pantry on nights when you can’t really be bothered but still want something fabulous, like her latest release, the aptly titled Something From Nothing.

Until recently, Roman thought her aversion to flamboyant cooking was an affinity for practicality and efficiency, or even an obsession with frugality and zero waste — she didn’t see it as a creative act until her husband told her in his vows that his favourite nights together were when they hadn’t been grocery shopping and she would root around in the pantry and throw together whatever they already had. That’s when he got to see how her imagination worked, he said.

“I’ve said some version of that [unfussiness] in all my books because I really believe in it,” she says. “It’s not like, ‘I’m lazy, I’m just using what I have,’ it’s ‘I’m using my creativity to create something amazing from what I already have.’”

I’ve called Roman during eight-month-old Charlie’s dinner time, but she’s characteristically unperturbed — or, rather, unfussed: she has one eye on her son and the food he’s pushing around his highchair tray and the other on our video call. “The food that I make is very simple and always has been, whether you’re cooking for yourself on a Tuesday or making dessert and having a lot of people over; it’s at the core of what I do,” she says. “There’s this misconception, especially in the professional restaurant world, that if it’s not elaborate, or you didn’t ‘push it further’, that it’s not great. And I’m like, ‘No, I’ve done that, and it’s not better.’”