Bon App blonde-off

Molly Baz’s ‘More Is More,’ Alison Roman’s ‘Sweet Enough’

Alison Roman’s Sweet Enough is such a stupid book. I say it with love. I say it as someone who happily went out and purchased a signed copy. I say it as someone with grown-out highlights and an apartment in the leafy bit of Brooklyn. I’ve made The Stew and The Cookies and I subscribe to The Newsletter and I thought that everything she expressed in that infamous interview was completely correct, as well as brave and funny. But Sweet Enough is a middling effort from a lazy writer whose recipes are frequently vague and error-ridden, and whose success is absolutely as rooted in her blonde hair and red lipstick as it is her flair for weeknight pasta.

Sweet Enough is about dessert, and it was clearly written for a quick buck. If you are even slightly primed on Roman you know that she’s the sort to serve her guests bodega ice-cream at the end of the night before demanding that they help do the dishes. This was actually the premise of her deservedly popular first book, Dining In, which acts as a sort of anti-dinner party dinner party guide. She has a savory tooth. Famously.

I just know that she didn’t finish eating that sundae

Indeed within a few pages Sweet Enough actually reneges on its own premise and includes a decidedly umami mushroom potpie recipe. True to form, Roman refers to the mushroom pie as “maybe the best-tasting” dish in the book, which is theoretically infuriating for anyone who actually purchased it to learn how to make cakes. I agree that the mushroom pie, while not revolutionary, is delicious, and in fact more appealing than most of the food in Sweet Enough. Unfortunately its accompanying instructions are written, tested, and edited atrociously. With many of Roman’s recipes, which are ostensibly crafted with newbie home cooks in mind, I find myself making automatic amendments to her advice based on my own knowledge and experience, which isn’t even particularly extensive. In this one, in defiance of its title, headnote, and photograph, you actually get instructions for how to make a traditional two-crusted pie as opposed to a pot pie, which is bottomless and would require less time in the oven.

There’s also a salted lemon shortbread cookie so poorly tested that Roman was forced to issue an apology and revision over Instagram Story after the book had already gone to print. She has actually always been haphazard in this way. Her famous New York Times Cooking shallot pasta is worth the hype once you get it right but also benefits from plenty of comment section research beforehand because the measurements and timings are significantly off.

Sweet Enough isn’t totally useless. Its banana bread is excellent and much better than the shitty ones that come up on Google. Roman has reprinted the same shortcrust pastry recipe that was included in her earlier two books, and it’s a good one, although the big secret is that her pastry tastes better than others you’ve tried to make because it uses nearly double the amount of butter. Overall though your money is far better spent on the competing blonde Bon Appetit alum Clarkson Potter cookbook that came out in 2023, Molly Baz’s More Is More. It is a superior tome in every way, whether or not you’re a fan of Baz’s sing-song frat bro writing style. Even the titles exist in accidental but telling opposition to one another: More Is More a declaration that Baz will stop at nothing to build her brand, Sweet Enough a distracted “this will do, send to print.”

Baz has always had a more clearly defined image and audience than millennial everywoman Roman, and with More Is More she doubles down. Replete with full-page photographs of its author and her similarly rich-looking, celebrity-adjacent friends dining in sunlit Californian splendor (no cramped Brooklyn walk-ups here), the book contains recipes for a specific and proudly obnoxious kind of person. “Chicky chicky bread bread,” for example, is a clever way to use up that $14 loaf of sourdough from the scene-y farmer’s market. Store bought is not fine. The results are shockingly tasty and the instructions so detailed that you can’t fuck it up.

Peak early-2020s creative agency aesthetic. Put it in a time capsule

Much of the fare in More Is More is heavy on the salt and oil, not always to anyone’s benefit. A recipe for fried rice and salami is a late-night drunk student meal at best. But at least the book is structured thoughtfully. The extra QR code videos are fun. The copy has been rigorously edited. Baz has clearly wondered why somebody would spend $40-50 on a cookbook when they could access infinite free recipes online, and she has come upon the correct answer. More Is More is impressive-looking and invites perusal. Each of Roman’s books have a slightly different typeface on the spine, which means that when you line them up on a shelf their titles don’t match up, even though they are clearly meant to. Baz’s two primary-colored books meanwhile make a lovely set to put on display, perhaps leaning artfully against some ceramics on your open kitchen shelving. And once you open them you could easily spend a couple of hours delightedly flicking through each. I love how she breaks each recipe into approachable phases and helps the reader assemble dinner party menus by suggesting which dishes pair best with each other.

It’s frustrating. Because I have so much more use for Roman than Baz. Baz’s recipes are more like restaurant food than home cooking. They’re trend-based and occasionally sort of silly. In the coming decades I believe that scanning her books will be like reading goofy ‘70s dinner party recipes that are heavy on the aspic. Then again, Roman is usually reinventing the wheel. That’s maybe worse? There are hundreds of excellent pasta cookbooks, ditto cookies, ditto pies and galettes — hers simply aren’t all that special a lot of the time, and at worst they’re carelessly thrown together.

Both of the Bon App Blondes have their place, of course, and I fantasize that at some point they came to a truce. Maybe there’s a martini-stained Keens napkin in a butter-yellow drawer somewhere with a contract written in Essie Clambake dictating that Roman gets New York and Baz gets L.A. That Roman writes in adult English and Baz writes in adult baby. I’m completely projecting their rivalry but still wish that Roman had come for Baz instead of Marie Kondo back in 2020. Baz and her landfill-destined Crate & Barrel collection. Baz and her cloying attachment to husband and dog. Baz and her mayonnaise brand. Suffice to say that Baz is a much fairer target than most, and knows it — that’s why she made sure her book wasn’t mid.