IF YOU'RE NOT ALREADY A FOOD PERSON, THIS BOOK WILL TURN YOU INTO ONE

How Food Person by Adam Roberts Inspired My First Foray into French Cooking

I just finished reading Food Person by Adam Roberts and was fully immersed in the story by the first chapter. The characters are dynamic and lovable—albeit sometimes annoying. But isn’t everyone you love a little annoying sometimes?

The main character, Isabella, is 25, living in New York City, and desperate to become a well-known voice in the food and cookbook industry. She dreams of being like Alison Roman or Sohla El-Waylly, with her own platform to share recipes and cultivate a devoted following.

It was fascinating to be inside Isabella’s headspace—she could be absolutely insufferable. She thought she was hot shit, that no one was more talented than her, and couldn’t understand why the world hadn’t caught on to her genius—even though she wasn’t exactly doing much to put herself out there. And then I had a moment of realization: oh shit, am I Isabella?

I definitely was a few years ago when I first entered the real world after college. And while I’ve grown a bit since then, I still catch myself getting that same righteous attitude. Maybe that’s why I found her so irritating at times—she reminded me of a past version of myself. I, too, am an Alison Roman fan and have spent more than a few minutes daydreaming about having a platform like hers—or at least being as chic and sophisticated. I’ve also caught myself wondering, Why aren’t my bosses promoting me after three months?—even though we both know I was firmly committed to doing the bare minimum.

What I loved about Food Person is how well it captured the struggles of a 25-year-old ambitious woman with a very specific dream, who ends up having to pivot in more ways than one. When Isabella meets a famous actress, Molly Babcock, she initially thinks the job of ghostwriting her cookbook is beneath her—until her local icon Alice, a cookbook store owner, informs her that many famous cookbook authors, like Paula Deen, Bobby Flay, and Gwyneth Paltrow, use ghostwriters. Turns out, ghostwriting is how many food professionals make steady money.

Amid the literal traumatic journey of Isabella and Molly working together, we also learn about some of their favorite dishes: the chocolate soufflé that ends Isabella’s writing career as she knows it, her famous eggs for her roommate, and the gourmet branzino with garlic herb fries at Snakebite—the trendy new spot where she meets Gabe, her content-in-life boyfriend. Basically, my mouth was watering the entire time, even as my eyes were rolling at Isabella and Molly.

While Food Person didn’t necessarily make me want to write a cookbook, it did make me want to cook like I was writing one. One of the praise blurbs on the back, from Plum Sykes, reads: “Sharp, funny, and bang on trend, this novel is a Devil Wears Prada for devoted foodies. I had to stop every other chapter to cook a chocolate soufflé or brownies!” When I read that I thought she was being dramatic until…

There was one meal Isabella makes in an effort to get Molly to understand her vision for the cookbook: coq au vin, butternut-squash soup, and bananas Foster. You’ll have to read the book to see the complete disaster the bananas Foster leaves in its wake, but the way Adam Roberts, through Isabella, describes the coq au vin made me want to cook it that instant.

“Coq au vin is a deceptively simple dish. The steps themselves are fairly straightforward: render the bacon, brown the chicken in the bacon fat, sauté the mirepoix (carrots, onions, celery), add the flour, stew with red wine. What separates the good from the great is the execution: How well do you brown the bird? How vigorously do you simmer the meat? Do you cheat with frozen pearl onions, or do you peel fresh pearl onions yourself—boiling them first, shocking them in ice water so the skins come loose—or do you skip the pearl onions altogether?”

At the time, it was sunny and warm in Portland—not exactly stew weather. It was more like the kind of day that screams for fresh produce in its purest form. But Portland pulled through, as it always does in June, and on the first day of summer, it was rainy and in the 50s. Perfect coq au vin weather.

So I texted my mom—who is like a home-cook encyclopedia and has classic recipes ready to go at all times. After a bit of sifting through her hundreds of cookbooks and a giant binder filled to the brim with recipes—not unlike Molly Babcock’s mother in Food Person—she eventually sent me a traditional coq au vin recipe from The Yankee Church Supper (she’s from New Jersey), one book she used to cook from when I was a kid and got one of my all-time favorite recipes: a chicken casserole with potato chips on top.

I left my cozy, warm apartment to brave the rain and the chaos of a Saturday grocery run—wet carts, long lines, and kids screaming at the top of their lungs. But it was worth it. I did not make coq au vin as well as Isabella, but for my first attempt, it turned out pretty delicious.

The chicken was moist and tender, falling off the bone like vinegar separating from oil and, just like Isabella, I served it over egg noodles. I did however, underestimate how quickly flour-dredged chicken browns, which led to a few pieces getting, let’s say, aggressively seared. They still added a nice depth of flavor though…so maybe I meant to do that?

I also searched high and low for fresh pearl onions, but after three stores and one annoyed “we don’t carry that,” I ended up with frozen ones. Probably not up to Isabella’s standards—she’d definitely scoff—but hey, they worked just well. As someone who's never tried the fresh kind, I was more than satisfied and blissfully unaware of what I was missing.

I haven’t mastered the art of French cooking (yet), but Food Person definitely inspired me to try—and kept me entertained with mid-twenties chaos and delightfully unhinged family dynamics.

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