Caviar on chips, brown butter potato salad: Alison Roman’s cooking isn’t ‘lazy’, it’s fun

Alison Roman’s newest cookbook Something from Nothing is an ode to the millennial home cook who forgets their weekly grocery shop, and can’t financially justify another dinner at the local wine bar.

The collection of more than 250 recipes takes a “high-low” approach to common pantry items (radishes with salted butter, tinned anchovies with pickled bread, or potato chips with caviar) and throws them together to create relaxed, vaguely Mediterranean fare.

Roman is a New York-based cook, author and internet personality with a knack for tapping into the millennial cultural zeitgeist. First, there were “the cookies”: Roman’s recipe for salted chocolate chunk shortbread cookies which propelled her to social media stardom in 2018. Then, there was “the pasta”: caramelised shallot pasta which became The New York Times′ most popular recipe of 2020.

Shortly after there was “the cancellation”: when Roman publicly criticised Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo (both celebrities of Asian descent) for capitalising on their fame, leading to accusations of racism, food appropriation, and the loss of her bi-weekly column in The New York Times.

In an apology swiftly posted to Twitter (the social media platform now known as X), Roman described her remarks as “tone-deaf”, and said she was determined to learn from the experience.

Something from Nothing is Roman’s second cookbook to follow the controversy (the first was 2023’s Sweet Enough: A Dessert Cookbook). It is an “adult” cookbook, she writes, “Mature, even”.

This one appeals to the millennial generation with tales of a growing career, a growing family, and the growing realisation that it’s more sensible to buy potato chips than spend your scarce spare time frying farmers’ market spuds in seed-free oil.

“I’m not a lazy cook, really,” Roman writes. “But … as a cook and an eater, I’m turned off by needless complications.”

There are make-ahead potato salads for summer picnics, cheap and speedy dinners using canned chickpeas, and a slightly simplified version of her famous “goodbye meatballs”, made famous in the aftermath of a “not-so-tragic” break-up in 2020.

– Bianca Hrovat

Picnic salad with cucumbers and fennel

If you like pickles (and I do), you’ll love this salad (I really do). It’s got both actual pickled peppers and bracingly acidic, marinated cucumbers and fennel. The whole salad stays crunchy forever and only gets more delicious with time, thus making it the ideal eat-me-outside-on-a-blanket picnic salad.

But even indoors, it’s great for lunch with a tin of fish and torn baguette, or for dinner alongside grilled meat or a pot of herby orzo. It goes without saying that it might be the perfect Hot Dog Party accompaniment, taking the place of slaw or any other raw vegetable side.

Don’t be put off by how juicy this salad gets: The blessing of a cucumber is how much liquid it gives off once cut, crushed and seasoned, creating its own dressing. The pickled peppers are there for textural contrast, tang and a delightful spiciness, packing a lot in without adding more liquid to the mix. They also have the ability to turn anything they touch into something that reminds me of my favourite turkey sandwich from Subway (turkey, mustard, iceberg lettuce, pickled peppers, onion, vinegar, salt and pepper on a roll).

INGREDIENTS

• 675g cucumbers (I like either baby/Persian or English/long hot house cucumbers, but any type will do)
• 1 fennel bulb, thinly sliced
• 70g (½ cup) pepperoncini or other pickled peppers, chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, finely grated
• 2 tbsp white distilled vinegar, white wine vinegar or red wine vinegar, plus more to taste
• 1 tsp Aleppo pepper or gochugaru (optional)
• salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 20g (½ cup) finely chopped dill
• 25g (½ cup) finely chopped coriander or parsley

Do ahead:

The cucumbers, sans herbs, can be made one day ahead, wrapped and refrigerated (after that they get a little too soft and while they still taste very good, they lose a bit of their crunchy magic).

Eat with:

A few tins of your favourite fish, a ripped baguette or box of crackers, a wedge of very aged gouda – the kind with the crystals inside.

METHOD

1. Cut the cucumbers into about 2.5cm pieces, and then crush each piece of cucumber until it bursts, exposing its juicy interior and creating craggly edges. (You can do this either by simply smashing each piece of cucumber between the side of your knife and a cutting board or by placing all the cucumber chunks in a large resealable plastic bag and crushing them with something heavy, like a rolling pin or small skillet.)
2. Transfer the cucumbers (and any juices they’ve released) to a large bowl. Add the fennel, peppers, garlic, vinegar and Aleppo pepper (if using). Season well with salt and pepper and toss to combine. Let everything sit for a few minutes if you can, tossing every now and then.
3. Taste the cucumbers again, then adjust with more salt and vinegar as needed. They shouldn’t be as tangy and salty as, say, a pickle, but they should be pretty tangy.
4. Once you’re closer to serving, add the herbs and toss to coat.

Serves 4-6

Browned butter potato salad

My stepmom’s mom’s German potato salad was my introduction to the genre and, ever since, the gold standard. She made hers with small red potatoes, bacon, dill, finely chopped spring onions, lots of apple cider vinegar and maybe some mustard, but never mayonnaise. Instead of trying to recreate hers and inevitably missing the mark, I’ve reimagined it, as a tribute.

This version is vegetarian, with lots of browned butter (which is also used to lightly fry some onions before dousing them in vinegar) taking the place of the bacon fat. The result is a mess of just-cooked, kind-of still crunchy, lightly frizzled then almost pickled onions that really do bring something special to the could-be-ordinary potato salad. Not for nothing, there’s at least an entire jar of capers, which also spend some time in the browned butter, losing their slipperiness and gaining some crispiness, a welcome texture among the creamy, crushed potatoes.

Note, if the potatoes are small enough – say, the size of a golf ball or smaller – I prefer to just boil them whole. If they’re larger than that, halve or quarter them before boiling.

INGREDIENTS

• 1.35kg small waxy potatoes
• 8 tbsp unsalted butter
• 60ml (¼ cup) olive oil, plus more to serve
• 1-2 x 100g jars capers, drained (I love capers, so I like more capers)
• 1 large red onion, sliced into thickish wedges
• salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 60ml (¼ cup) apple cider vinegar, white wine vinegar or champagne vinegar, plus more to taste
• 60ml (¼ cup) wholegrain mustard
• 1½-2 handfuls dill, coarsely chopped

Do ahead:

The potato salad can be made several days ahead – definitely two, but maybe more. Like many starchy salads, this gets better with time, although I do prefer it on the room-temperature side rather than chilled.

Eat with:

Your best friends and many, many hot dogs.

METHOD

1. Bring a large pot of well-salted water to the boil. Boil the potatoes until very tender, 12-15 minutes; drain and let cool slightly.
2. Meanwhile, melt the butter in a medium frypan over a medium-high heat. Cook, stirring occasionally, until it starts to foam and then brown, 2-3 minutes. Add the olive oil and capers and cook until browned and starting to crisp, 5-8 minutes. (Capers have a lot of moisture in them, frying them until crisp is getting rid of that moisture, so it can take a while.)
3. Add the onions, season with salt and pepper, and cook, tossing or stirring every so often, until the onions are tender and starting to brown at the edges and the capers are very crispy, 8-10 minutes.
4. Remove the pan from the heat, add the vinegar and toss to coat. Transfer the butter-onion mixture to a large bowl and add the mustard and dill.
5. Once the potatoes are cool enough to handle, crush them to expose their insides. (I like to do this in my palm, but you can also smash them on a cutting board.) Add them to the bowl and toss very well to coat, crushing the potatoes further as you go, seasoning again with salt and lots and lots of pepper – more pepper than you think. More! OK, that’s good. Adjust with more vinegar or a drizzle of olive oil if you think it needs it.

Serves 6-8

Goodbye meatballs

I am proud of all my recipes, but especially of the canonically classic ones. It’s not that I’ve reinvented them (as I said, they remain canon), but rather that I’ve configured each one to suit my platonic ideal, tailored to my specific criteria, tweaked to meet my often ridiculously high standards. Buttermilk biscuits. Matzo ball soup. Pie crust. Meatballs. I am particular, and so are these recipes.

Perhaps more than other classics, meatball recipes tend to have a lot of “secrets”: the bread for the crumbs has to be from a five-day-old loaf, the crumbs must be soaked in whole milk, there should be a scant teaspoon of Top Secret Thing, they should be seared first or, wait, no, dropped straight into the sauce ... so on and so forth. If you’re interested in making wonderful meatballs, I’m sure you’ve heard one or more of these things before. Through trial and error, eating many subpar and excellent meatballs, and texting my Aunt Liz in New Jersey, I arrived at my own recipe, though tragically devoid of “secrets”.

These are your basic, very good meatballs in the style of Italian American red-sauce joints, and to me, they are perfect: a mixture of beef and pork, with panko breadcrumbs (I love an all-purpose crumb) that are softened in ricotta with eggs to bind.

There are plenty of alliums (raw onion and garlic), lots of fresh parsley and a good amount of hard, salty parmesan. They’re seared in the pot before building the sauce because I do not think a meatball browned in the oven is brown enough. It’s admittedly more work to do them stove top, sure, but you reap the rewards in the form of rendered fat, toasted bits and browned, delicious meat that flavours your sauce.

Note, I first made these meatballs after a not-so-tragic breakup. For better or for worse, the name stuck.

INGREDIENTS

For the meatballs

• 225g (1 cup) whole-milk ricotta
• 30g (½ cup) finely chopped parsley
• 30g (½ cup) grated parmesan cheese
• 20g (⅓ cup) panko breadcrumbs
• 2 large eggs
• 2 or 3 garlic cloves, finely grated or chopped
• ½ medium yellow or red onion, very finely chopped (you’ll use the other half of the onion for the sauce)
• 2 tsp salt, plus more to taste
• freshly ground black pepper and/or chilli flakes
• 450g minced beef
• 450g minced pork (or more beef if you don’t eat pork)
• 2 tbsp olive oil

For the sauce

• 1½ medium yellow or red onions, finely chopped
• 6 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
• salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 2 tbsp tomato paste
• a few anchovies or a couple of dashes of fish sauce (optional)
• 4 x 400g cans crushed tomatoes and/or whole peeled tomatoes, crushed by hand

Do ahead:

The raw meatball mixture freezes well, so you could always make half and freeze the rest for later.

Eat with:

Meatballs really need no suggestions, but I will say that beyond the bowl of spaghetti or platter of rigatoni, they are excellent over soft, cheesy polenta or simply on their own with some garlic bread with which to dunk.

METHOD

1. Make the meatballs: Mix the ricotta, parsley, parmesan, breadcrumbs, eggs, garlic and onion in a medium bowl. Season with salt, pepper and chilli flakes (if you like), and let sit for 10 minutes or so. (This hydrates the breadcrumbs, which leads to very juicy meatballs – do not skip or rush this step.)
2. Add the beef, pork and remaining 2 teaspoons salt. Using your hands (I have never had good luck using a spoon), mix everything together well – it should look like sausage, evenly flecked with bits here and there, but not paste-like. Once it is well mixed, roll one tiny sacrificial meatball to cook.
3. Heat the olive oil in a large pot over a medium heat. Add the sacrificial meatball and cook until it’s well browned on all sides and cooked through. Take it out of the pot and eat it. Does it taste amazing? Salty? Meaty? Tender and juicy without falling apart? Do you want it spicier? Go ahead and adjust the seasoning as needed.
4. Roll the rest of the mixture into balls 3-5cm in diameter. This is my preference, so if you enjoy a larger meatball, then be my beautiful guest. I get roughly 24 meatballs from this mixture, more or less.
5. Working in batches, brown the meatballs on all sides, 4-6 minutes per batch. They will not be cooked through – that’s fine; they will finish cooking in the sauce. It’s important to remember that this isn’t a round meatball contest; it’s a brown meatball contest (not the time or place to sacrifice deliciousness for aesthetics).
6. Once the meatballs are properly browned, transfer them to a large plate or bowl and continue with the rest of the meat. Once they are all browned, congratulate yourself on a job well done and let them hang out while you make the sauce.
7. Make the sauce: Without wiping out the pot, add the onions and garlic and season with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until they’re translucent and tender but not yet browned, 8-10 minutes. Add the tomato paste and anchovies (if using) and stir until the anchovies are melted and the tomato paste has begun to caramelise and turn a darker shade of red, 2-3 minutes.
8. Add the tinned tomatoes. Fill one of the empty tins halfway with water and swirl to get all the tomato bits out, then pour the liquid into the pot. Season with salt and pepper.
9. Bring to a simmer and adjust for salt, knowing the sauce will reduce and become a bit saltier while it cooks with the meatballs. Add your meatballs and all the juices that have collected at the bottom of the plate.
10. Reduce the heat to low and simmer the meatballs in the sauce, uncovered, until the sauce is thickened and impossibly delicious and the meatballs are cooked through and perfectly tender, 30-40 minutes.

This is an edited extract from Something from Nothing by Alison Roman, published by Quadrille. Photography by Chris Bernabeo.

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