Alison Roman is playing to her own rules with Sweet Enough
An unexpected question to begin: can you recommend a book simply on the writer’s predilection for rhubarb? Yes, you can. Alison Roman’s third book, Sweet Enough is all the proof you need. We’ll get to the book in a wider sense in a moment but first more on this rhubarb thing.
Here in Australia were in the first days of autumn, though it still feels distinctly like summer. Yet my feed has been crammed in recent weeks with rhubarb in the northern hemisphere, a spring vegetable close to my heart. I was born close to Yorkshire’s pagan sounding rhubarb triangle (so perhaps it’s in the blood), where dank, dark sheds and candlelight weave a certain magic to produce a “forced” Winter crop that precedes Spring.
I didn't particularly get on with it when I was a kid, which I’d guess was about the face puckering sourness. But as my palate developed rhubarb became a love in both sweet and savoury form.
Roman devotes space to it as a substitution for other ingredients, and perhaps in its peak form: slow roasted. She proclaims, rhubarb is a gift. Writing very much for her US audience she says, “raw it has a crunchy celery-esque texture, an unforgivable sourness, but roasted with a bit of sugar it transforms… jammy and tender with a stringy silkiness almost like the inside of a long-roasted eggplant with an incredible balance of sweet and sour. I wish it were more popular and therefore more accessible… But I'm telling you, if you see it, get excited.”
Roman, pushing an ingredient that she rates, and waits for, which doesn’t have a hold in her home market, is what I want in a cookbook. That’s to say I want to know the ingredients that writers love, imagining seasonally what they get excited by. It’s about moments of seasonal joy because a cookbook without that is an unpalatable proposition. You may want a cookbook that is a functional, practical work that forgoes any story or opinion, but for me that’s the internet. I want books by writers who would stand by each dish, and tell you why they’d cook, eat, and serve each one.
Nora Ephron's bread pudding recreated from Ephron’s novel Heartburn brings back more than memories of a brick-like effort I made in Home Economics over 30 years ago. You may know Ephron as the writer-director of Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and the writer of When Harry Met Sally, but she was so much more as a writer. With honesty Roman confesses it’s not even a dish that she’s enamored with, but it serves as an excuse to pay homage to Ephron and share personal experience.
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