The biggest new book of 2024 isn’t the latest Liane Moriarty novel or a Jane-Harper-esque crime thriller. Neither do any of the books on literary prize shortlists like the Booker Prize or the Miles Franklin.

It’s a cookbook – RecipeTin Eats: Tonight is the sequel to food writer Nagi Maehashi’s 2022 bestseller, Dinner.

In a category dominated by celebrity chefs and complex recipes that require a long list of ingredients, Maehashi’s website — Recipe Eats Tin – and the scope of his books is much more modest.

Yet Aussies have shown they have an insatiable appetite for all things RecipeTin Eats.

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

RecipeTin Eats: Dinner is Australia’s third best-selling cookbook (after Jamie Oliver’s Jamie’s 15-Minute Meals and Kim McCosker and Rachael Bermingham’s 4 Ingredients). It won the ABIA Book of the Year award in 2023 and became a New York Times bestseller.

He will perform even better tonight. It sold more than 78,000 copies, breaking the record for the highest first-week sales of a nonfiction book (previously held by Scott Pape’s The Barefoot Investor for Families).

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

Moreover, he also took part in MasterChef Australia and Play School.

So what makes Maehashi’s food so popular?

“I’ll add a spicy dish every once in a while because I love hot peppers. But overall (my recipes) are a crowd pleaser and cover all kinds of cuisines because life is too short to stick to just one cuisine. If you can make Mexican food one night, it’s much more interesting than Middle Eastern food the next night.” It’s happening.”

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 imagine my mom and me standing at the counter, rolling the meatballs together, laughing gently… but that’s far from the truth because I was a complete brat as a kid. I didn’t help in the kitchen at all,” she says.

“I moved away from home at 18 to take a full-time corporate job, and I was blown away by not having a hot dinner waiting for me every day. And that’s what forced me to learn how to (cook) because I couldn’t afford to eat out every day, which is what started it all.” That was it.”

Maehashi may be a newbie, but she was used to eating her mother’s delicious cooking, and this became her reference.

“He’s a great cook,” says Maehashi.

“It’s really good on traditional Japanese dishes, but it’s also good on a lot of Western dishes.”

Maehashi, who spent his days working as an auditor in the financial sector, continued cooking as his hobby. But after 17 years, he was ready for a change.

“I always worked very long hours, climbed the corporate ladder, and just wanted to do something for myself,” he says.

Maehashi left his job without a clear plan for what to do next. By chance, she stumbled upon the world of food blogging.

He thought he could use his newfound skills in the kitchen to create his own food blog, and he did so in 2014.

His initial goal was modest: “All I wanted was to cover my rent and keep food on the table,” he says.

“I never imagined I would grow big enough to have a team. I dreamed of owning a nonprofit (RecipeTin Meals, a food bank founded in 2021), but I never imagined it would come in time. It did.

“It doesn’t feel real.”

Demand for midweek meals

When it came to starting work on her second book, Maehashi found the task challenging in unexpected ways. He felt pressure to deliver something fresh while also meeting the expectations of Dinner’s many fans.

“I took the feedback I got from my first cookbook about the recipes that people really embraced and loved…and it was by far the midweek, quick and easy (meals),” she says.

But Maehashi is quick to clarify that midweek doesn’t mean being boring.

“This wasn’t just chicken breasts in a pan with a bucketful of butter,” he says.

The resulting book includes dishes such as crispy lemon garlic butter chicken, a twist on Maehashi’s most popular recipe. baked chicken breast – and sticky Asian dumplings. One section, What You’ve Got, showcases pantry staples, while another is devoted to Maehashi’s successful stir-fry sauce known as Charlie.

Maehashi says inspirational cookbooks full of beautiful images and long ingredient lists have had their place, but she wants to publish books “that people use a lot.”

Over the decade, Maehashi has also streamlined the recipe development process: She comes up with an idea, tests it in her home kitchen until she’s happy with the result, and then passes it off to an independent recipe tester. He will then photograph the food, film himself cooking it for the website, write it up and post it.

Although his food is very simple, he takes a scientific approach to solving some culinary conundrums, such as how to prepare the crispiest french fries.

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

“The best way to do this is to boil them—just don’t soak them—but if you boil the thin fries for more than a few minutes they will fall apart,” he explains.

“However, if you add vinegar to the water, the french fries do not fall apart. If you add a little vinegar to the water, you can boil the potatoes for much longer.”

Maehashi also performs “side-by-side testing” to perfect her recipes; This means readers can trust how the recipes will turn out.

“You always hear that meat with bones is juicier than meat without bones, so I literally did a 12-hour lamb, one with the bone on, one without the bone, they were exactly the same, and side by side I could see that there was 20 percent more juice retained in the bone-in lamb compared to the boneless lamb,” he says.

New Year’s gift for bookstores

Dymocks Sydney managing director Jon Page says a new RecipeTin Eats cookbook is a boon for bookstores ahead of Christmas.

In 2022, RecipeTin Eats: Dinner has arrived at the perfect time; as retail sales reopen after two years of lockdown.

“It captured the zeitgeist and literally blew up all the cookbooks that Christmas. There was a new Ottolenghi, there was a new Jamie Oliver, there were a lot of big names, and outsold all these books, two to one, more than three. Everybody loved Nagi He wanted it.”

Page says they think the game will be popular due to “hundreds” of pre-orders.

“We knew this was going to be big, but it was bigger than anyone could have imagined.”

Even more unusually, RecipeTin Eats: Dinner has remained on the bestseller list through 2023 (and has sold over 100,000 copies so far in 2024).

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

And while all sales are good for business, he expects Tonight to increase sales of other titles by 10 to 15 percent as well; This is a phenomenon witnessed in January 2023 with the release of Prince Harry’s Spare.

Page believes the appeal of Maehashi’s recipes lies in their simplicity; But it’s not just his food that attracts people.

“It’s also his personality,” Page says.

And then there’s Dozer, her photogenic 12-year-old Golden Retriever who is a regular on the blog.

“We dropped Nagi off at the store… and half the people were gathered around Dozer,” Page says.

“Dozer was a superstar.”