Alison Roman: ‘My desserts are consistently imperfect’

Alison Roman’s cooking is a counsel of imperfection. She serves dinner late (fine, as long as you have snacks), gets her guests to pitch in on the washing up and won’t make her own ice cream – ‘it simply will never be better than what you can buy, sorry’. ’Her ‘pies leak, cheesecakes crack and pound cakes are pulled from the oven before they’re fully baked. Lopsided and wonky, occasionally almost burned, unevenly frosted, my desserts are consistently imperfect’. In her new book, Sweet Enough, Roman wants to free the home cook from the dessert ties that bind them. ‘My hope for you,’ she tells her reader, ‘is that you strive for the animalistically irresistible, not aesthetically pristine’. The two, she finds, are ‘rarely the same’.

Roman, 37, is the archetypical millennial food writer: beautiful and effortlessly stylish, with a Brooklyn-based lifestyle that has the same deliberately casual aesthetic as her food. She was senior food editor at Bon Appétit and had a column with the New York Times, and a host of her recipes have gone viral. She loves anchovies and lemons and shallots; her taste ‘skews salty, tart and bitter’. And her opinions are as bold as her flavours: for many, her strident, semi-serious declarations about food were as compelling as her recipes. But three years ago, they got her into trouble. She made some ill-judged comments in an interview about decluttering guru Marie Kondo and model and TV presenter Chrissy Teigen which caused a small media storm, and raised questions about her – and other recipe writers’ – use of globally established dishes without appropriate cultural attribution. She apologised, but it was too late. She lost her column at the New York Times and was, for want of a better word, cancelled.