Alison Roman, star of online food culture in the 2010s, has a new cookbook out that is (in an apparent first for her) slumming it in the Budget Cooking category on Amazon. It's a pantry book called Something From Nothing, which promises recipes with ingredients that might already be lying around your house, ready to be made into something ... from nothing.
The recipe that Alison Roman may be best known for today is her caramelized-shallot pasta, published in 2020 when she was a food writer for The New York Times. It became the defining recipe of the early pandemic in part because its ingredients-except for the anchovy fillets-are pretty basic. And there are only 10 of them, including the pasta and salt. For Roman, the mega-viral recipe came to embody her signature "Stone Soup style": familiar ingredients magically transformed.