Alison Roman Won't Sugarcoat It

She cooked her way through a controversy. Now she's ready to talk about it

- By Eliana Dockterman

Alison Roman is cooking rice, a grain she dismissed as "filler" in her 2017 cookbook Dining In. But she's preparing a Passover dessert, and leavening agents are verboten. Roman isn't a chocolate person, so flourless chocolate cake is out. But in 2015, rabbis declared rice kosher for Passover after an 800-year ban. So rice pudding it is.

It's February, over a month before the Jewish holiday, but Roman needs to get the all-day shoot done for her Home Movies YouTube series before she goes on tour for her latest cookbook, Sweet Enough, out March 28. Her loftlike Brooklyn apartment with whitewashed brick walls and exposed pipes looks more like a studio than a living space when stuffed with lights and cameras. Pots boil over and dishes pile up, but Roman approaches the chaos with enviable levity, squeezing lemon here and sprinkling red pepper flakes there while declaring to the camera that the word unctuous has been banished from her vocabulary for onomatopoeic reasons. Being invited into Roman's kitchen is like snagging a seat at your foodie friend's boozy dinner party, a vibe that helped her 2021 "Thanksgiving Special" rack up over 1 million views.