Why RecipeTin Eats: Tonight, Nagi Maehashi's new cookbook, is a Christmas gift to booksellers

The biggest new book of 2024 isn't the latest Liane Moriarty novel or a Jane-Harper-esque crime thriller. Nor is it any of the books that appear on literary award shortlists like the Booker Prize or the Miles Franklin.

It's a cookbook — RecipeTin Eats: Tonight, food writer Nagi Maehashi's follow-up to her bestselling 2022 debut, Dinner.

In a category dominated by celebrity chefs and complex recipes requiring a long list of ingredients, Maehashi's website — RecipeTin Eats — and her books are much more modest in scope.

And yet, Australians have shown they have an insatiable appetite for all things RecipeTin Eats.

The website has more than 500 million views each year and 6.5 million followers on social media.

RecipeTin Eats: Dinner is Australia's third-highest-selling cookbook (after Jamie's 15-Minute Meals by Jamie Oliver and 4 Ingredients by Kim McCosker and Rachael Bermingham), according to Nielsen BookScan Australia. It won ABIA Book of the Year in 2023 and made the New York Times bestseller list.

Tonight is set to do even better. It broke the record for the highest first week of sales for a non-fiction title (previously held by Scott Pape's The Barefoot Investor for Families), selling more than 78,000 copies (Nielsen BookScan Australia).

Maehashi made headlines by promising to personally reimburse fans who pre-ordered Tonight on Booktopia before it went into voluntary administration in July.

And to top it off, she's appeared on MasterChef Australia and Play School.

So, what makes Maehashi's food so popular?

"I'll throw in the odd spicy dish every now and then because I do love chilli. But generally, [my recipes] are crowd-pleasers, and they span all sorts of cuisines because life is too short to stick to one cuisine. It's so much more interesting if you can do Mexican one night then Middle Eastern [the next]."

From the corporate world to the kitchen

Maehashi was born in Japan and moved to Australia as a child, but cooking wasn't a big part of her childhood.

"A lot of people have this vision of mum and me standing at the counter wrapping dumplings together, laughing gently … but it's so far from the truth because I was such a brat when I was a kid. I didn't help in the kitchen at all," she says.

"I moved out of home at 18 to work a full-time job in corporate and I was just shell-shocked that I didn't have a hot dinner waiting for me every day. And that is what forced me to learn how to [cook] because I couldn't afford to eat out every day. That's what started it all."

Maehashi may have been a novice but she was accustomed to eating her mother's delicious food, which became her benchmark.

"She's a great cook," Maehashi says.

"She's really good at traditional Japanese food, but also a lot of Western foods as well."

Cooking remained Maehashi's hobby while she spent her days working as an auditor in the finance industry. However, after 17 years, she was ready for a change.

"I always worked really long hours, climbed the corporate ladder, and I just wanted to do something for myself," she says.

Maehashi quit her job without a clear plan for what she was going to do next. By chance, she stumbled upon the world of food blogs.

She thought she could use her new-found skills in the kitchen to create her own food blog, which she did in 2014.

Her initial goal was modest: "All I wanted was to cover my rent and keep food on the table," she says.

"I never imagined that I'd grow to be able to have a team. I dreamed of having a not-for-profit [RecipeTin Meals, a food bank started in 2021], but I never imagined that it would come in the time that it did.

"It doesn't feel real."

A demand for midweek meals

When it came to starting work on her second book, Maehashi found the task challenging in unexpected ways. She felt pressure to satisfy the expectations of Dinner's many fans, while at the same time offering something fresh.

"I took on board the feedback that I got from my first cookbook about the recipes that people really latched onto and loved … and by far and away, it was the midweek, quick-and-easy [meals]," she says.

But Maehashi is quick to clarify that midweek doesn't mean boring,

"It wasn't just chicken breast slapped in a pan with a bucket load of butter," she says.

The resulting book features dishes such as crispy lemon garlic butter chicken — a twist on Maehashi's most popular recipe, oven-baked chicken breast — and sticky Asian meatballs. One chapter, What You've Got on Hand, showcases pantry staples, while another is dedicated to Maehashi's smash-hit stir-fry sauce, known as Charlie.

Maehashi says aspirational cookbooks filled with beautiful imagery and long lists of ingredients have their place, but she wants to publish books that "people use a lot".

Ten years in, Maehashi has also streamlined her process for developing recipes: She comes up with an idea, tests it in her home kitchen until she's happy with the result and then passes it on to an independent recipe tester. She'll then photograph the dish, film herself cooking it for the website, write it up and publish it.

While her food is unfussy, she takes a scientific approach to nutting out some kitchen conundrums — such as how to create the crispiest fries.

The trick, she reveals, is to remove the starch.

"The best way to do that is to boil it — don't just soak it — but if you boil thin fries for more than a couple of minutes, they crumble," she explains.

"However, if you add vinegar into the water, then the fries don't crumble. You can boil potatoes for far longer if you put a bit of vinegar in the water."

Maehashi also carries out "side-by-side testing" to foolproof her recipes, meaning readers can trust how the recipes will turn out.

"You always hear that bone-in meat is more juicy than boneless meat, so I literally did a 12-hour lamb, one with bone in, one with bone out, exactly the same, and was able to see side-by-side that 20 per cent more juice was retained in bone-in compared to boneless lamb," she says.

A Christmas gift for booksellers

Jon Page — the general manager of Dymocks Sydney — says a new RecipeTin Eats cookbook is a boon for booksellers in the lead-up to Christmas.

In 2022, RecipeTin Eats: Dinner landed at the perfect time — as retail was reopening after two years of lockdowns.

"She hit that Zeitgeist, and she blew literally every cookbook out of the water that Christmas. There was a new Ottolenghi, there was a new Jamie Oliver, there were all these big names, and she outsold all those books two to one, three to one. Everyone wanted Nagi."

Page says they had a sense it would be popular due to "hundreds" of pre-orders.

"We knew it was going to be big but it was bigger than anyone could have imagined."

Even more unusually, RecipeTin Eats: Dinner stayed on the bestseller list throughout 2023 as well (and has so far sold more than 100,000 copies in 2024).

Two years later, booksellers anticipate Tonight will be a similarly enduring bestseller.

And while all sales are good for business, he also expects Tonight to boost sales of other titles by 10-15 per cent, a phenomenon witnessed with the publication of Prince Harry's Spare in January 2023.

Page believes the appeal of Maehashi's recipes lies in their simplicity — but it's not just her food that draws people in.

"It's her personality as well," Page says.

And then there's Dozer, her photogenic 12-year-old golden retriever who is a regular on the blog.

"We had Nagi drop into the store … and half the people were flocking around Dozer," Page says.

"Dozer was a superstar."