The author’s recipe for a soup called Roberto has recently caught a wave of popularity on Instagram.Photograph by Jacob Pope
For the past month or so, ten or twenty times a day, I’ll get a little alert on my phone from Instagram, telling me that I’ve been mentioned in someone’s Story. In the three and a half years since Instagram introduced the Stories feature—a vehicle for candid snapshots and absurdist memes, all of which automatically delete after twenty-four hours—I’ve come to love it with a surprising intensity. All social media is performance, but the performance that happens inside Instagram Stories is in situ, it’s mumblecore,it’s social-media vérité: the room is messy, the face is blemished, the horizon line isn’t perfectly horizontal. Instagram’s main feed is full of images so slick that they’re indistinguishable from ads, but the text and image tools in Stories are (apparently by design) blocky and inelegant. It’s a perfect medium for recording the insipid mundanities of daily life, which is to say, it’s the perfect medium for recording what you’re having for dinner. This is why, for the most part, I keep getting tagged in other people’s stories: they’re making Roberto.
Roberto is a soup. It (he?) was born during the winter, six or seven years ago, when I put together a quick dinner by sautéing some onion and garlic with a few links of spicy Italian sausage, dumping in a can of white beans and a can of crushed tomatoes, adding a few cups of chicken stock, and stirring in a fistful of torn kale. The result was good, but not quite good enough, so in went a flurry of grated Parmesan, for savory depth, and a shower of lemon juice, to lend some tart, shimmery brightness. Almost no individual element of this was original—beans and greens have been the stuff of dinner since beans and greens began—and yet the gestalt had something to it, something unexpectedly right. It was hearty, but not heavy; it was warming, but not soporific. The next night, we made it again. And then again, and again, and after a few weeks of eating it nearly nonstop my husband said, wisely, “This soup needs a name.” With a wisdom far beyond my ken, he added that the soup’s name was Roberto. And so it was.
A few years after that, in 2016, I wrote about Roberto in a personal e-mail newsletter that I had started, back when everyone was starting personal e-mail newsletters. The e-mail’s subject wasn’t Roberto itself but rather the notion of recipe writing: I had written the recipe in a somewhat unconventional way, conversational and digressive and overly detailed, a voice meant to preëmpt any incoming questions about substitutions or techniques from my husband, who was as much a fan of making Roberto as he was of eating it, but who was (at the time) far less comfortable in the kitchen than I was. That e-mail went out to a few hundred subscribers, a small handful of whom were moved to make Roberto and loved it the way I did, which was validating. Time moved on. I sent my newsletter less and less, until I stopped sending updates altogether, as is the inevitable fate of all newsletters, though the online archives lived on.
Then, this winter, Roberto exploded. I’m still not entirely sure why. Maybe we’re all chronicling our dinner more than we used to, or maybe this year’s winter demands beans and kale more than other winters, or maybe the fickle gods of virality decided that, Hey, right now, we’re all going to be really into this three-year-old soup recipe with a silly name, buried in a newsletter archive. The end result, however we got here, is that, every day, people are telling me that they’ve made my soup, and that they really like it. They’re mostly telling me on Instagram Stories, which makes it easy for me to take their Roberto pictures and share them with my own audience: a daily, collated folio of worldwide Roberto incarnations, points of light from a far-flung and wide-ranging soup-making collective whose individual expressions of happiness fill me, strangely and wondrously, with a pure and unfamiliar happiness of my own.
Instagram etiquette does not demand that I reshare other people’s Robertos, but it feels like the right thing to do. The writer Julia Turshen’s Instagram Story is filled with re-shares of people making the Happy Wife, Happy Life Chocolate Cake from her cookbook “Small Victories”; the “Salt Fat Acid Heat” author and Netflix star Samin Nosrat uses hers to amplify home cooks who make her airy Ligurian focaccia and bronzed buttermilk chicken; the whole month of December was full of the Los Angeles Times cooking columnist Ben Mims sharing homemade renditions of his gorgeous holiday cookies.
As far as I can tell, patient zero for this style of re-sharing is the cookbook phenom Alison Roman, who for years now has dropped regular carousels of fans making her chocolate-chip shortbread cookies, her coconut-turmeric stew, her citrus-tiled salmon fillet, her roasted chicken with olives. The over-all effect of these posts is unexpectedly profound; it gives rise to the sort of warm, sappy sense of being part of something that makes me wonder if I maybe didn’t get enough sleep last night—a feeling of synchronicity, of emotional connection. Internet experts and food-media talking heads spend a lot of time nattering on about the idea of “community,” which almost always ends up not actually meaning “community” at all but, rather, vituperative comment sections, or the same old dinner parties with one’s existing friends (or, sometimes, both). But in these theme-and-variations Story bursts—the visual evidence of dozens of people’s spontaneous actions, their joy in the creation and pleasure in the consumption—the sense of community is almost physically tangible. Watching the real-time unfolding of so many people’s culinary undertakings feels, somehow, like real human connection.
Earlier this week I called Roman, to fact-check my memory that the phenomenon originated with her. “It feels a little weird and arrogant to say ‘I came up with that,’ but I do think I came up with that!” she said, laughing. In late 2017, shortly after Roman’s first cookbook, “Dining In,” was published, her chocolate-chip shortbread cookies emerged as a wildly successful breakout recipe. Roman is a bona-fide Instagram star, with some 344,000 followers, and, when her notifications exploded with people tagging her in their cookie-making efforts, they rolled in by the hundreds and thousands. She started taking screenshots of people’s posts and stories and collecting them in a folder on her phone, and every few days she’d post a bundle of other people’s successes on her own account: a rapid-fire montage of twenty or thirty home cooks from all over the world, all making the same one of her strikingly photogenic recipes. “I wanted to encourage everybody,” Roman said. “And then it became this really cute online cookbook club. People like feeling involved; they like being seen; they like being encouraged. They’re, like, ‘Oh! That could be me!’”
The effect, I can personally confirm, is exactly that. For those few months after “Dining In” was published, every time I opened Instagram and checked Roman’s account, I was pummelled with images of cookie after cookie after cookie: some were beautiful, some were wonky; some were lovingly bathed in sunshine, some were shakily snapped in the sallow glow of an oven. All of them were overlaid with Roman’s messages of delight and encouragement, and among the names of the devoted original posters I saw friends, enemies, celebrities, strangers. The feeling grew in me subtly, steadily, over weeks, a slow intoxication that ended in full-body certainty: Of course I was going to make the cookies. And I was going to tag Roman in a picture of them on Instagram. And she was going to share my post, my cookie triumph, one more star in the constellation of cookie triumphs. I did, and she did, and, by God, it felt terrific. It’s thrilling to see yourself seen, and lifted up, and shown off—it’s proof that you were there, that you were part of something. It’s a fifteen-second turn in the spotlight, like glancing up at the Jumbotron and seeing yourself on the Kiss Cam.
Re-shared posts beget more posts to be re-shared, and the circles widen until, eventually, they collapse—or we collectively move on to some other recipe. It’s tempting to refer to these Instagram feedback loops as viral recipes, but the phrase doesn’t quite fit. “I actually take issue with the term ‘viral recipe,’” Roman told me. She pointed out that most things labelled “viral recipes” are actually just viral videos that happen to contain food, and that, generally, the foods they depict are fascinating only because of their monstrousness: fifteen types of meat piled on a teetering sandwich, or a pizza made out of fried chicken that’s then deep fried into a waffle taco and dipped in bucket of ranch dressing draped in edible gold. These recipes are not destined to be made by a normal person at home, let alone actually consumed.
