‘Heinous amounts of butter and cheese!’ – Poppy O’Toole’s new cookbook is a spud-fuelled fever dream

The sheer amount of butter, cream and, of course, potatoes, used in the making of Poppy O’Toole’s new cookbook is quite astounding.

Actually, the word O’Toole uses, with a wicked laugh, is “heinous”.

“Heinous amounts!” she says. “We came into the studio to shoot the book and one whole fridge shelf was just blocks of butter, and another shelf was just cheese and cream. I was like, ‘Wow, this is what dreams are made of. This is incredible.’ There was, like, 50 kilos of potatoes under the counter, and then just cheese and butter everywhere. It was beautiful.”

All of it was in service of her new ode to the spud, The Potato Book, a collection of recipes that take the humble potato and elevate it to levels of previously unseen glitz and glamour.

There’s whipped clouds of mash displayed in coupe glasses, confit garlic butter potatoes cooked over 15 hours and crisped into Turner Prize-worthy sculptures, and a potato cake that is a tiered, wedding cake alternative, complete with potato smiley faces – which she now makes for her birthday each year.

“Potatoes are so not glamorous, so I really wanted to do them justice,” says O’Toole affectionately. Her love of the starchy tuber is completely understandable. “They’ve brought me everything,” says O’Toole, who is better known as Poppy Cooks on TikTok, where her potato videos first went stratospheric.

In lockdown, unable to do her day job as a Michelin-trained chef, O’Toole began posting recipes online, and it’s her potato ones that most struck a chord. Since then, her videos have totted up a colossal 1 billion views and launched her as a cookery book writer.

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“It’s quite unbelievable,” she says, noting that 200 people or even 20,000 people in a stadium she can just about imagine, but for her videos to have been viewed 1 billion times, with people “possibly be able to recreate the recipes, or enjoy them, or even if they hate it, they’ve still watched it. It’s quite amazing.”

The spud has changed the 31-year-old’s life. “I have always been a potato fiend. I just didn’t realise it could also be a career,” she says.

The doyenne of the food world, Nigella Lawson, has dubbed her the “High Priestess of Potato” (“I will never recover from that,”), O’Toole’s done a skit with Elmo off Sesame Street:  “They’d made their own special potato just for that, they didn’t have a potato puppet prior, which is just like, wow! Elmo is iconic.”

And she’s been able to work with chefs who she grew up watching and admiring, like Michel Roux Jr, who she did a YouTube potato cook-off with (“Hilarious,”) and Rosemary Shrager: “I loved her, and now I’m at her birthday party! It’s like, what on earth is going on?! And that’s all genuinely down to potatoes.”

The taters might have something to do with all this success, but really, it’s O’Toole, who grew up in Bromsgrove near Birmingham. She radiates fun, is positively gleeful in all her videos, and makes you feel included, capable and worthy of making an effort for yourself when it comes to cooking.

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“A good meal can really change your day, your attitude, everything. It does for me. If I have a bad meal, I’m like, ‘Oh,’ it ruins the whole evening,” she says.

“I just want to help show people that they can achieve really good food at home. And it doesn’t have to be that intense. It can just be a really good jacket potato. It doesn’t have to be like wagyu steak with gold leaf and all this jazz, because that isn’t what food’s about.

“Food is about enjoyment, embracing each other, the way you feel and the way the food makes you feel.” It’s that idea that got her into cooking in the first place, “as well as wanting to eat loads of food!”

The way she tackles unsolicited comments from internet trolls, as well as sexism in her industry is also majestic. O’Toole recently rebutted claims from a prominent male chef (Jason Atherton) that sexism isn’t rife in the restaurant world, and in a video titled “Nobody asked”, called out someone that had commented on her weight.

“I do quite enjoy them a little bit. Sometimes they’re good for content,” she admits ruefully of such comments. “Anyone can always ask me about food, ask me about how things are done, or maybe a recipe didn’t work for them. I’m all good for that. Saying, ‘Oh, you look like you’ve put on weight,’ that’s completely irrelevant to everything that’s happening in the world right now. Why is that of any importance to you?”

But generally, her content is full of joy and potatoey goodness. If she could only eat one type of spud for the rest of her life, “roast potatoes would be my go-to. It’s a shame that we don’t have them more regularly,” she says. “They should be just an everyday occurrence.”

And don’t worry, she truly doesn’t expect anyone to make every single recipe in the book, however delicious they might be. “I don’t really mind if people don’t use any of the recipes as long as they take, maybe it’s a new way of cooking, a new ingredient they’ve never used before but they love, or maybe it’s a spice blend that they like,” she says. “Taking away those small nuggets of information that they can use in their everyday cooking, which hopefully makes it better, is all I can ask for.”

‘The Potato Book’ by Poppy Cooks (Bloomsbury, £22).