Alison Roman

The holidays are here. If you’re like me, you may view the year’s major baking season with slight dread, not because you’re a Scrooge, but because you lack confidence, patience or skill as a baker. Recipe developer and cooking influencer Alison Roman has written a cookbook for people like us, who find the “science” of baking frustrating compared to the “art” of cooking. The cookbook, Sweet Enough, affirms this preference; in a section called “What I Hate about Baking,” Roman lists gripes: “I hate when I mess up and feel like I wasted hours of my life.” Same. But this book, written with non-bakers in mind, is for the most part flexible and forgiving, and may well become your companion this December.

There comes a time in every home cook’s life when she is separated from her craft. This may be due to illness, incapacity, repairs, renovations or, worstof all, moving house. This month, I moved from Texas to Pennsylvania. Between packing up my utensils and appliances, waiting for the moving truck to make its halting way across the nation, and finally unpacking and reorganizing my tools, I lost my kitchen for four weeks. But benched cooks like mehave a surprisingly satisfying alternative: cooking podcasts. The first podcast I tried is most similar to traditional cooking shows: Food 52’s Play Me a Recipe. Chefs and cookbook authors host episodes in which they introduce a favorite recipe and talk through its ingredients and method, encouraging listeners to pause and rewind as needed.

Alison Roman is back on YouTube with a new video on making homemade smashburgers, including some very strong opinions on how to best dress the griddled patties: iceberg lettuce, thinly sliced onion, NO TOMATO, pickles and tons of mustard. Oh, and hold the fries: instead serve ’em up with a heaping side of cancel culture. In the middle of Roman's cheeky rant about her pickiness when it comes to burgers, the cookbook author and food vlogger declares that the bun has "got to be" a "potato roll." However, Roman never actually says the "potato roll" part — it's actually dubbed in via a text-to-speech robot. When Roman holds up the package of "perfect" potato rolls, the brand name is blurred. Why?

However else we may criticize the late 90s and early 00s — its politics, its fashion, its music — this was undeniably the golden age of the celebrity chef. Barefoot Contessa, 30-Minute Meals and The Iron Chef franchises all debuted in the first decade of this millennium, minting stars like Bobby Flay, Guy Fieri and Nigella Lawson. I once found a collection of my brothers salivating over Giada de Laurentiis making meatballs on Everyday Italian, though they’d never demonstrated more interest in cooking than microwaving the odd Hot Pocket. The mid-aughts brought on the glory years of the “hands and pans” videos: the aerial-view clips of disembodied hands assembling cheeseburger pretzel balls or eighteen-layer taco dip.