How interesting is this! This month the cook book which has made the most sales in Australia is not anything coming out of Jamie Oliver or Donna Hay but it is a book coming out of self taught cook hailing from Sydney’s Northern Beaches – Nagi Maehashi.
If her name doesn’t sound familiar, he popular website “RecipeTin Eats” would ring a bell for those who search for recipes online to cook for their meal. Her debut book Dinner is now leading the cookbook charts for 2022, with more than 74,500 copies sold. That’s three times as many sales as the second most-popular book, Jamie Oliver’s One, at 23,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookData.
She attributes her success to being a “home cook” and is quite appreciative of people’s support and response to her book’s release. She tells The Sydney Morning Herald:
“I am just like everybody else. I shop where everyone shops, I don’t go to gourmet stores … The thing that really resonates, that people say to me, is that I’ve somehow managed to guess the recipes people want.”
“I really like to do it myself because I feel like I really know the dish and I know what I love about it, whether it’s the sauciness of something or the shininess of something, or I really want to show the inside.”
“A lot of people said they just spent so much time on the website during lockdown. That’s how they made that connection with me … It was one of the things people had to look forward to in their day.”
She has been touring across Australia over the past month promoting her book. Maehashi was born in Japan and raised in Sydney, and told The Sydney Morning Herald that she only started to learn cooking after she turned 18, moved out and had to cook on her own to survive.
Maehashi’s book Dinner can be purchased online at any book selling websites, like Amazon etc, and also you can probably find it in your local bookstore.
Images via Facebook and RecipeTin Eats