As the writer Andrea Nguyen has observed, the brash, prescriptive “bro tone” that has served many a male food-world personality so well is increasingly becoming gender-neutral. Roman has been one of its premier female purveyors, rarely shying away from—and occasionally picking—a fight. “Rice has always seemed like filler to me,” she wrote in 2016’s “Dining In,” dismissing the world’s second most important cereal crop as though she were swiping left.
At the end of 2018, Roman débuted what became known as #TheStew (né Spiced Chickpea Stew with Coconut and Turmeric). To make it, you soften garlic, ginger, and onions in olive oil. You add chickpeas, frying them with red-pepper flakes and turmeric, then simmer them in coconut milk. After wilting in greens, you serve the dish with mint leaves, a dollop of yogurt, and toasted flatbread. The recipe was healthful. It was warming. It was, to some readers, obviously an Indian chana masala or chole or, alternatively, a Jamaican chickpea curry. “This is neither a soup nor a stew, it’s called chana masala, and Indians have been eating it for centuries. Seriously, 🙄,” an Instagram user named Priya Ahuja Donatelli wrote, in the comments of a post in which Roman had announced a giveaway with an equity-focussed spice company, inviting readers to respond with their “favorite ideas for dismantling the patriarchy OR cooking with turmeric.”
Roman was speaking the language of social justice, but she wasn’t crediting the cultures from which she drew certain techniques and ingredients. She was shine theory in her head, but Sun Tzu in her heart. “I don’t read other cookbooks, I don’t follow anybody on Instagram,” she told me one day. “That clouds shit for me.” Nor did she acknowledge that her branding implied personal ownership over deep-rooted dishes. (“I wasn’t very thoughtful about it,” she said recently.)
“There’s a sense in editorial, publishing, and TV spaces that, if you are from a nonwhite background, what you talk about has to be generated from your identity in some way,” Endolyn told me. “But if you’re a white person you can go anywhere you want. You can talk about Asian cuisines, you can talk about African or African American cuisines, you can talk about South American cuisines. No one’s saying you can’t cook with turmeric—cook with turmeric, turn orange if you want to! The point is to recognize that people from nonwhite, non-Eurocentric cultures tend to be pigeonholed by their identity (which isn’t necessarily a measure of expertise) and not offered the same leeway to experiment, play, and ‘discover’ things.”
When Jezebel asked Roman about the issue of cultural appropriation, she dug in her heels. “Y’all, this is not a curry,” she said. “I’ve never made a curry.” She added, “I come from no culture. I have no culture. I’m like, vaguely European.” Through years of being told online that she was fat, that her pants were ugly, that her voice was annoying, Roman had learned to tune out negative feedback, positioning herself in opposition to whomever she perceived as a hater. She sometimes lent her support to progressive causes, but she was also hesitant to stray from her area of expertise, once telling Cherry Bombe, “Compared to a lot of women in our field and industry, I am definitely on the quieter side of politics, but that’s mostly because of my educational level.”
Her justifications and her critics’ objections converged at a certain point, with everyone agreeing that she just liked to make food that tasted good, without going much deeper. Her occasional attempts to take a more scholarly approach could feel half-hearted. “I’ve taken a negative public stance on rice in the past, and generally speaking, I stand by that stance,” she wrote in 2019’s “Nothing Fancy,” introducing a recipe inspired by tahdig, a Persian rice specialty. “But people can grow—so let me say this: Rice, sometimes you are great.” Her recipe, she said, “more or less gets the job done, without requiring the patience or technique (I have neither!).”
“Maybe that’s her genius, to say that the thing that she’s done exists in a complete vacuum,” the writer Alicia Kennedy told me. “It’s not new, but people don’t want new—they want what she’s selling.” You can detect the intentionality of her branding in her recipe titles and tags: The Only Piecrust, Everyone’s Favorite Celebration Cake, #TheStew, #TheCookies. “Low key, a lot of what I do is marketing,” Roman admitted to me one day, with typical frankness. She later added, “Marketing is not a pejorative.”
“The thing is that she has a culture, and it’s actually the dominant culture,” the food writer Charlotte Druckman told me. “It’s white-people food in that sort of aspirational, fratty, life-style-magazine area. And for her to call it ‘no culture’ is to dismiss the fact that she’s part of this cultural event.” Roman was willing to sound off on almost anything—why not a few words about the origins of turmeric? She was famously combative—why not fight a good fight, recognizing the flaws of a system that wasn’t her fault but nonetheless wasn’t fair? Why not make it her business to know what a chole is, if she’s getting paid to make chickpea stew?
In our early conversations, Roman claimed to understand, to some extent, the criticism. “I had a lot of friends—people of color—who were, like, ‘We experience this all the time,’ ” she told me, in April of 2020. “We do things for years and years, and all of a sudden a white person does it, and it’s, like, ‘Oh, look at this thing!’ ” But she was ambivalent about the charge of cultural appropriation. Eventually, she revised #TheStew’s headnote to include a reference to “stews found in South India and parts of the Caribbean.” Roman said that she had made the change because of the Internet outcry. “I didn’t call it a curry because it’s not a curry,” she said. “And I think that, if I had called it a curry, the same amount, if not more, people would have responded, ‘That’s not a real curry. Why are you calling it a curry?’ So, in that context, I could not win.”
Roman launched “A Newsletter” in June of 2020, acknowledging her choice of “a title so uncreative it could only have come from someone who never planned on launching a newsletter.” At first, it functioned both as a sort of missing-person bulletin, in which she could keep her fans updated on her whereabouts, professionally and emotionally, and as an instrument of penance, with which she would try to make amends. “While this newsletter is free and without a paywall, there will always be an option to subscribe for a small donation, with 100% going to a rotating monthly charity,” she wrote in the first dispatch, which was about tuna salad, the only food, she wrote, that she’d recently been able to summon the will to make. She published her e-mail address, promising to read and respond to every message she received. Within a few months, though, one could detect hints of her old pugnaciousness intermingling with newfound caution. Writing in August about making bean salads at a shared vacation house, she acknowledged that “it might become apparent I am not cooking alone, and I refuse to pretend that I am for the sake of sparing my friends and myself a Covid-dining-related public shaming.”
According to Roman, the Times told her that August that it wasn’t bringing back her column. In an e-mail to me, she wrote that she’d been led to believe that she would be returning, “so didn’t think I needed to figure out a plan re: income (in retrospect, very naïve lol).” (A Times spokesperson said that Roman’s “column went on hiatus in May 2020. She informed us that September that she had decided to pursue other opportunities.”) Roman was now the sole proprietor of a business she had never really intended to launch. The product she needed to scale up and even disrupt was herself. “I’m not trying to pivot to being, like, ‘All right, buckle up, this is my new food blog, and I’m going to teach you about racism,’ ” she said last year. “It’s about continuing to be myself, a more sensitive version of myself.”
Dining and Cooking