Alison Roman's Anchovy Shallot Pasta

If you know me, it’s no secret that I’m a fan of Alison Roman. She made me interested in learning more about cooking past the basics, past being able to make a sandwich and boil pasta. She led me to find a part of myself that was passionate about making good food and experimenting with recipes and new ingredients, and made that passion grow exponentially.

One of her first recipes I made was her very famous and well known anchovy shallot pasta. I made it for the first time 4 years ago during the part of 2020 where we realized the pandemic was now part of our lives and wasn’t going away anytime soon. So to pass the time we tried new hobbies, right?

Before I made anchovy pasta, I was just cooking when I needed to. But like everyone else at this time I started getting interested in making my own bread which led me to search online for more food content. I discovered NYT Cooking and was thus introduced to AR while she was a staff writer there.

The recipe peaked my interest because it wasn’t too involved, but it did require some specialty ingredients I had never worked with before. I didn’t grow up eating shallots, so those were new, and anchovies were never something that sounded good to me but Alison promised they wouldn’t taste fishy. And to be fair, her extremely likable personality that came across her YouTube video cooking this recipe made me an instant fan. If you want to watch the video recipe, make sure to click on her version to support her directly.

I’ve made her anchovy pasta so many times over the past 4 years that I know what I’m doing now, but the first time I made it, I fucked up in a lot of ways.

I read the recipe wrong and accidentally used double the amount of tomato paste; I used rigatoni instead of long noodles (which to be fair, pasta shapes are so often interchangeable that you’d think this would be a fine substitution, but this sauce really is best with long noodles); I didn’t save enough pasta water to dilute the paste properly. The result was a heavily concentrated, weirdly chunky, really unappetizing dish. But I was determined to get it right, so I tried again and again.

Even though I tried many more times, there were still days where I messed up again – I often salted my pasta water too heavily and when using it to thin out the sauce, the entire dish came out way too salty. It took me a few times to remember that and not salt the water as much. Sometimes I didn’t transfer the pasta to the sauce early enough and ended up overcooking it.

But I’m at a point now where I know exactly what to do and what not to do. I don’t have to reference the recipe too much either. And that’s the beautiful thing about cooking – you learn something new every time and get better with each try. The first time you make something may not be that great, but you can always try again. And when you do get it right, it’s an accomplishment you can feel really proud of.