Chef and social media star Poppy O’Toole doesn’t mind when trolls come for her appearance – she just wants them to be kind about her food.
O’Toole (better known as Poppy Cooks online) is a Michelin-trained chef who rose to fame with potato recipes on TikTok, earning her the title the ‘High Priestess of the Potato’ from none other than Nigella Lawson.
Her TikTok and Instagram videos are full of mouthwatering recipes (yes, with plenty of potatoes) – and the odd post clapping back at comments from trolls.
“I’m the first one to make the joke at myself,” says O’Toole, 32.
O’Toole worked in professional kitchens before focusing on social media (Haarala Hamilton/PA)
“It’s when someone insults the food more than me. Come for me – I already know all the things you could say, but not the potatoes. I’ve tried really hard at these – these are actually something I really want you to like.”
O’Toole is half joking, but there’s a serious reason why she wants to call out these negative comments. While she admits trolls “did knock me a few times” when she started her social media career in 2020, now it doesn’t bother her – but it “could really hurt somebody” who isn’t as “thick-skinned” as she is.
“A lot of people [say], don’t give them attention. I need to give them attention… Someone has to keep being like, no, this isn’t OK.”
Even though her videos targeting trolls are laced with O’Toole’s signature humour, she’s keenly aware where a vast proportion of the negativity stems from: misogyny.
“Even if it comes from a woman, it’s misogyny – it’s just internalised misogyny. Every single time. There are male chefs out there who are doing the same thing as me, probably doing better most of the time, and they don’t get half the amount of stick that I do – if any.”
One thing that comes up time and time again is O’Toole’s nails. “I have my nails done sometimes to make sure they look nice, then I don’t have my nails done, and [trolls] are like, ‘Oh it’s disgusting – you’ve got your nails done!’ or, ‘Oh it’s disgusting – you’ve [not] got your nails done’. Are you saying this to any other chef? Are you saying this to a man who’s got short nails?
“That’s one that really annoys me, because you could only be saying that to a woman and it’s completely pointless – it takes nothing away from the stuff I’m doing. I do feel like there is definitely a misogynistic side to it all.”
Not that trolls have slowed Worcestershire-based O’Toole’s rapid ascent. After working in Michelin-star kitchens, during Covid she switched her attention to social media – clocking up 4.7 million TikTok followers, 1.4 million Instagram followers, and recently achieving more than 100,000 subscribers on YouTube (but she can’t think about the numbers, saying “it would just freak me out”). TV appearances have followed – including Saturday Kitchen and a judging spot on the BBC’s Young MasterChef.
If that wasn’t enough on her plate, last December O’Toole gave birth to a baby girl, her first child with husband Tom Shattock. She says becoming a parent has completely changed her approach to food: “I’m going for more quick and easy stuff. I’ve found that you don’t – especially as a mother, not to say anything about fathers – but you don’t get much chance to eat.
“So being able to have stuff in the fridge prepped it great. Also, I’ve found that you’ve got to eat with one hand – especially when I was breastfeeding for a bit. Breastfeeding, you need to eat as soon as the baby’s anywhere near the boobs. You need a water and you need a bowl of food instantly. It drains you.”
Luckily, O’Toole’s freezer was fully stocked for the arrival of her baby, because during pregnancy she was writing her latest cookbook, Poppy Cooks: The Actually Delicious Batch Cookbook, which has just been released.
Her goal was to come up with food that’s “delicious once it’s been reheated”, saying: “Sometimes freezer food hasn’t quite done what I wanted it to do. It’s gone watery, or it’s gone a bit soppy. So I developed dishes that reheated beautifully and – I want to say, not [necessarily] better than the original, but they’ve had time for the flavours to really come together and get intense. I do find that sometimes with this recipe book, the food has almost gotten better after it’s in the freezer.”
She used her background in professional kitchens to improve her dishes. “Obviously, it’s not called batch cooking in kitchens – it’s just called getting prepped,” she says.
O’Toole’s latest cookbook is all about batch cooking (Haarala Hamilton/PA)
“I used to cook in one place that was doing banqueting, so we’d be cooking for hundreds of people and we can’t get that ready on the day. It needs to be ready weeks before, when we’ve got time. So it was all about how you preserve flavours.
“Usually, making food so flavourful and so full of fats really helps with the freezing and reheating, so that’s in most of my books. Actually it’s all very flavourful and very fatty – that’s me!”
Another tip O’Toole picked up is the importance of what you freeze your food in: she favours glass boxes because “the contact of the freezer isn’t getting onto food, whereas with a thin plastic bag, the freezing goes through everything”.
She mainly wants people to pour a bit more love into their batch cooking. Looking at other batch-cooking books, she says she was “never excited by it, and I want to make it exciting” (but rushes to add: “It’s really horrible, because I don’t mean to slag anybody off, there’s no one in particular!”)
Her dishes are created to be frozen – not something people always keep in mind. O’Toole notes a common mistake is people throwing portions of their leftover dinner in the freezer and calling it a day, when “sometimes those dishes just aren’t going to work out”.
She adds: “How do I say this politely? It’s not worth throwing half-eaten food in the freezer. It isn’t going to last as well as a recipe that has been designed to be put into the freezer.”
And don’t worry: this is still the High Priestess of the Potato we’re talking about, so there’s a whole chapter dedicated to freezing the humble spud.
From a curried potato pie to portions of mash potato, O’Toole says: “There was no way I wasn’t putting potatoes in. They freeze so well.”
(Bloomsbury Publishing/PA)
Poppy Cooks: The Actually Delicious Batch Cookbook by Poppy O’Toole is published in hardback by Bloomsbury Publishing. Photography by Haarala Hamilton. Available now.
