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.
In these surprisingly lovely Instagram flurries, in contrast, the food is quiet and human-scale. The photographs of Roman’s cookies or Turshen’s cake or my Roberto soup are just shorthand for the entire process of making the recipe, the hour or so (or, in the case of Nosrat’s focaccia, sixteen hours) that goes into assembling ingredients, following the steps, waiting, watching, hoping, and finally eating. And it’s not just mindless replication: as with any act of creation, the end result reflects a piece of whoever made it. I marvel, as the influx of Roberto photos flows around me, at people’s ingenuity and flexibility: spinach instead of kale, adding tortellini, using heirloom beans, swapping vegetarian sausage for the pork or turkey, poaching an egg in the pot, adding some anchovy paste, treating it like a pasta sauce. The recipe isn’t mine anymore; Roberto has taken on a life of his own, and it’s thrilling. “To spend your own money and time, to actually make the thing—it’s so different than just sharing or liking,” Roman said. “It’s something on an entirely different level.” Maybe this is the highest thing a person can hope for: I loved something, I shared it, and now I get to watch other people love it, too.
Serves 2
Ingredients
Olive oil
1 baseball-size onion, if you have one
2-4 cloves garlic (enough garlic to make up approximately the volume of your thumb)
Salt
1 lb. hot Italian sausage, or a well-seasoned vegetarian sausage
1 28-oz. can tomatoes (diced, crushed, or whole)
1 14-oz. can of beans of any type (kidney, great northern, garbanzo, etc.) or a similar quantity of cooked dried beans
4 cups stock of any sort, or a mix of 1 cup dry red or white wine and 3 cups water
1 bunch kale or any other green
Fresh-ground black pepper
Hard, salty cheese, like Parmesan or pecorino
One lemon
Parsley, if you have any
Directions
1. Gather all your ingredients, and get out a large soup pot with a lid, and a wooden spoon. If your sausage is in a casing, remove it from the casing, so it’s like a paste of ground meat with seasonings in it, which is mostly all that sausage is. If you’re using vegetarian sausage or casing-free sausage, chop it into small pieces. Peel the onion and chop it into small pieces. Peel the garlic and finely mince it.
2. Put the olive oil and onions into the soup pot, and set it over medium heat. Add a pinch of salt (a pinch is about a quarter teaspoon) and stir. Slowly cook the onions until they start to become soft and translucent—this is usually about 4 minutes, but sometimes it takes as long as 7. Add the garlic and stir until you get hit with that nostalgic garlic-and-onion smell, about 1 minute. Raise the heat to medium-high and add the sausage to the pot. Stir, using your spoon to break up the sausage into pieces that could comfortably fit on a spoon. It’s better to overcook the sausage than to undercook it. For the best flavor, you want the pieces to begin to brown on the outside: they should look speckled with dark spots, like a leopard or a cute dog. This will take as long as 10 minutes. Be patient. You don’t have to stir constantly—just check on it every few minutes.
3. While the sausage is cooking, open the can of tomatoes, and open and drain the can of beans. Get your broth ready, or if you’re using water with wine, get that ready. De-stem the kale and chop it into smaller-than-spoon-size pieces.
4. When the sausage is starting to brown and looks and smells delicious, dump in the tomatoes (including all the liquid), the beans (it’s O.K. if there’s a little liquid left in the can and you add that, too), and the stock, and raise the heat to high in order to bring the whole thing to a simmer. (If you’ve used canned whole tomatoes, use your wooden spoon to break them into smaller pieces by violently crushing them against the side of the pot. You cannot over-crush the tomatoes.)
5. Once the soup has reached a simmer, add the kale. The pot will look extremely full, but don’t worry—the kale will collapse like an empty wedding gown as soon as you start stirring it in, which you should do. Once all the greens are in the pot, put the lid on, turn the heat down to medium-low, and let the whole thing simmer for about 5 minutes—or even longer if you want to, or if you have other things going on. Use this time to grate some of the cheese into a bowl, which you can reuse later to eat soup out of. You don’t need a lot of cheese—maybe a quarter cup, but it’s up to you.
6. Remove the lid from the pot and stir the greens into the soup. Taste the soup (use the wooden spoon; you’re less likely to burn your mouth) and consider how much salt and black pepper you think it needs. Then add half as much salt as you want to and twice as much pepper. Add a little more pepper. Dump in the shredded cheese and stir. Taste it again and see if you need more salt. (The secret is that the cheese has salt in it.)
7. Ladle the soup, which is very hot, into individual bowls. Buy some time for it to cool down by cutting a lemon into wedges and squeezing a wedge of juice into each bowl. If any lemon seeds fall out into the bowls, gently fish them out. Don’t drop the spent wedges into the bowls like they’re glasses of iced tea. If you have extra cheese, you can sprinkle it on top, and if you have parsley and want to chop up some parsley and put it on top, it’ll be good, but it’s also pretty great without it.
