Crowd Pleaser

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. If you’ve cooked from the book or watched the show, you love Samin Nosrat. We all do. Which is why we just had to meet her and find out: why can we not get enough?

People never used to look at me twice,’ Samin says, sitting on an overstuffed, over-pillowed couch. ‘That was my superpower: when I met someone, I could decide whether to care about them based on whether they cared about me.’

A lot of people care about Samin now. I remember soon after her cookbook – Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat – came out in April 2017, a friend pressing it into my hands like something illicit. ‘You have to read this.’ Then her four-episode cooking-and-travel show based on the book appeared on Netflix, and it seemed like everyone was talking about those soy-braised short ribs or that miso egg. My friends who didn’t cook were posting photos of homemade focaccia. Something was happening.

Today, Samin’s not only a James Beard Award-winning darling of the food world, she’s an internet meme (google ‘Samin Nosrat Golden Girls’); a think-piece subject (‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is Marxist Fantasy Porn’); and a person who gets tweets from Hollywood directors (‘A treat to watch you,’ wrote Ava DuVernay).

I’m here with Samin because I want to know what it’s like to have a fairly quiet career in food for almost 20 years – never running a restaurant, never appearing on MasterChef, just taking catering and teaching gigs as they came – then, at almost 40, become a full-blown food celebrity. I want to know why so many of us have fallen so hard for her at a time when we’re saturated with food content on every platform, when, on any given night, you can binge-watch more than 100 episodes of The Great British Bake Off. Why Samin? Why now?