Pinch of Nom suddenly makes Delia and Heston look a little stale

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/29/pinch-of-nom-delia-heston-cookbook-weight-loss

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Pinch of Nom isn’t a phenomenon. A phenomenon has a beginning and an end, but this thing – at first a Facebook group, then a food website, now a record-breaking cookbook – is as vast, as unstoppable, as the universe expanding. Authored by duo Kay Featherstone and Kate Allinson, Pinch of Nom was published in the UK on Thursday last week, and in just three days it sold more than 210,000 copies. To put this into perspective, in 2015 Ella Mills became the fastest-selling debut cookbook author of all time, selling 32,144 copies in one week.

There’s no doubt that Pinch of Nom has benefitted from the path forged by food blogger-cum-author stars such as Mills or Joe Wicks (who wrote Lean in 15). But the success of Featherstone and Allinson, who in 10 years have gone from running a Wirral restaurant together to topping the book charts, outstrips anything we’ve seen before. How did a simple diet book come to break the world of cookbooks as we know it?

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Keen to lose weight in a way that didn’t feel punishing, Allinson and Featherstone set up the Pinch of Nom Facebook group in 2016 with just a handful of members, posting recipes and sharing slimming tips. The origin myth would have it that people’s sheer goodwill and enthusiasm catapulted Pinch of Nom to sales success, but its founders know that’s not quite true. In a talk for ad management company Mediavine, Featherstone is forthright about the brand, its traffic and revenue, and a careful, constant monitoring of community feedback. This isn’t some misty-eyed vision of a nurturing home kitchen: Pinch of Nom was a targeted, keenly reactive business from the start.

This responsiveness is at the heart of the Pinch of Nom strategy, and it has paid off. The founders regularly ask members of the Facebook group (currently approaching 800,000 in number, not to mention the 1.4 million Facebook users who follow their public page) what recipes they’d like to see, using this feedback to meet readers where they’re at. This is a far cry from cookbooks as we know them, whether that’s Delia’s practical scolding or Heston’s expert credentials. There’s no commanding authorial presence here, just crowdsourced appetites, prettily repackaged. “People like feeling like they’re being listened to,” Featherstone cannily notes.

In their debut cookbook, full pages are devoted to shout-outs from the Pinch of Nom community. “Made the hash browns and they were truly delicious,” writes Becca. Nicola adds, “I loved the full English wraps. Breakfast winner!” There are quotes from Debbies, Caitlins and Kerrys – countless fans, nearly all women, who feel like the recipes were made with them in mind. Already on Amazon the book has accrued nearly 3,000 reviews, of which 92% are five stars.

And the recipes are fun, they really are. Ideas for “fakeaways” such as tandoori chicken kebab are nestled alongside easy midweek favourites such as tuna pasta and goulash. There are more than a few Frankenstein’s monster creations in there, like a Cheeseburger Pizza that uses a tortilla wrap for a base, but I have to admit that I find myself more roused to action by these recipes – easy, irreverent, inexpensive – than I am by a lot of the more involved recipes that grace the highbrow weekend food supplements.

Shortcuts such as onion or garlic granules in soups and stews are designed to keep fuss and costs to a minimum, while helpful notes pepper the text. For the Mediterranean chicken orzo recipe, the authors kindly point out that you’ll want to make sure it’s definitely allspice, not mixed spice, that you’re using. In more self-consciously authoritative cookbooks, this is the kind of knowledge that is rather unhelpfully presumed to be obvious. The title may be infantilising, and recipes nothing groundbreaking, but what lingers is the clear and enthusiastic message that nobody is trying to catch you out.

But for all this “you can do it!” ethos, the fact remains that this is a diet book, and an old-fashioned one at that. Calorie-minimising ingredients of yore such as sweetener, fat-free yoghurt and low-fat cheese make an untimely resurgence. Low-cal cooking spray is back, and clever tricks such as using cornflour to add body to a low-fat sauce feel like they’ve come straight from your mum’s cut-out Slimming World recipes from 1998. Indeed, Pinch of Nom, though swearing allegiance to no one diet plan, partners with Slimming World repeatedly in promotions, adverts and reviews.

Unlike the image-led books of the wellness brigade, headed up by the Hemsley sisters, Ella Mills and Madeleine Shaw, Pinch of Nom’s authors aren’t visible. There are no aspirational photos of slim women in summer dresses or aspirational lifestyle shots. What this all amounts to is a generalist’s guide to weight loss – transparent in its agenda, non-prescriptive in its methods, making an appeal to our collective memories of home-style food. Working across various diet plans, it brings its many disparate followers together under the unifying embrace of an imprecise but pervasive desire to “slim”.

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In You Have the Right to Remain Fat, Virgie Tovar writes: “Fatphobia creates an environment of hostility toward large-bodied people and promotes a pathological relationship to food and movement, and places the burden of anti-fat bias on ‘noncompliant’ individuals – that is, fat people.” The duo behind Pinch of Nom can’t be held entirely responsible for the toxic systems that uphold them. Nor can the members of the dynamic online community that they have created, the overwhelming majority of whom are just ordinary people seeking to make their bodies more palatable to an unkind and judgmental world. And yet it’s sad that the breakout successes of food publishing over recent years have overwhelmingly been diet books.

The food world has a history of ignoring those things that don’t conform to the tastes of its elite (such as Magnolia Table, for example). But we could stand to learn from the example of Pinch of Nom, without necessarily aping its aims. There is demand for a less prescriptive, more generous approach to recipe-writing. Writers such as Jack Monroe have been doing something similar, albeit without the looming weight-loss imperative, encouraging improvisation and shunning the food world’s usual snobbery about things like ready meals, kitchen shortcuts and canned food.

Pinch of Nom also reminds us of the importance of communities. As food writer Laurie Colwin famously wrote, “Nobody who cooks, cooks alone.” Hundreds of thousands of readers will find moments of unusual togetherness in these recipes, the act of cooking wrenched from the often isolating chamber of the domestic kitchen and embedded in a supportive, communal space. Pinch of Nom didn’t change the rules or even the recipes, it just forged a place where people could cook alone, together. That’s what makes a successful cookbook.