This year, at least five American adults dressed up as Alison Roman for Halloween.

In Roman’s home office, she has a framed note hanging above her desk. It’s
handwritten on thick card stock with a lengthy monogram: “sent with love and hugs
from the desk of taylor swift.” The note begins, “Full disclosure, this is a full
fan letter.” Swift’s favorite Alison Roman dishes, it turns out, are Baked Ziti,
Tomato-Poached Fish with Chili Oil and Herbs, and a Caramelized Shallot Pasta that
became a viral hit early in 2020. The recipe for the pasta was simple: bucatini, if
you could find it, with a jammy sauce of tomato paste, heaps of alliums, and a
whole tin of anchovies. “The quintessential Roman recipe has an accessibility and a
complexity, and, much like with all of Alison Roman, there are two things in direct
conflict with each other that don’t seem like they should work,” Cho said.

Shortly after the recipe was published, the pandemic shifted Roman’s field of
expertise—dining in—to the center of the conversation. She seemed to be everywhere:
drinking spritzes with Katie Couric during an Instagram pasta tutorial; comparing
different types of tinned fish, remotely, on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”;
cooking chicken with lentils on Zoom and popping a caramelized onion into her mouth
as though she were taking a shot. Eventually, the shallot pasta would be NYT
Cooking’s most popular recipe of 2020, a tubular strand connecting social media to
solitude and celebrity to civilian, with Roman occupying the charged territory in
between.