Viral TikTok sensation from Slough releases debut 'Craveable' cookbook

A food content creator from Slough with more than a million online fans is releasing her debut cookbook this week.

Seema Pankhania created Craveable – a collection of ‘truly delicious, accessible’ recipes that are ‘joyful, flavour-led’ and inspired by her travels.

Food has always been integral to the 27-year-old’s life and her inspiration is her hard-working single mother, Meena, who cooked a fresh homemade Indian meal from scratch daily.

“My mum more than anyone understood my passion for cooking because she also has that passion. She saw that I had a drive and a love for cooking and was like, that’s good enough for me,” Seema told the Express.

The former Langley Grammar School student was diagnosed with cancer at 13 and a year spent watching daytime cooking shows at John Radcliffe Hospital ‘kickstarted’ her interest in food.

This was ‘fuelled’ by Meena buying second-hand cooking equipment from Slough car boot sales, and Seema was soon baking her friend’s birthday cakes and selling cupcakes door-to-door and from a stand on Slough High Street.

“My mum works at Slough Tesco so…Slough Tesco was the big hub of it all,” said Seema.

“I would go there every day to get my ingredients, with my mum, and it would be like going to the pub because you meet everyone you know and my mum would chat with all the aunties there.

“It was such a big community vibe, which I think was lovely.”

Seema ditched a traditional career path and worked as a chef at Gordon Ramsay’s Lucky Cat, after securing her degree in neuroscience from Manchester University.

While working as a professional chef for two years, she was hit by a car during her moped commute from Slough to London one rainy morning and was hospitalised with a fractured elbow.

This was a turning point for Seema wanting to escape the ‘exhausting’ professional kitchen setting.

While recuperating, she launched ‘Seema Gets Baked’ and shipped homemade brownies across the country, before joining the online platform Mob Kitchen where she was a food creator for two years.

“I’ve been developing my brownie recipe for five or six years and I knew that’s a recipe I wanted to publish in my first cookbook,” said Seema.

“All of the recipes have come from a story [which] makes the book quite special.

“Each recipe has intention – why it’s there and where it's come from, whether it's from travelling, restaurants I've eaten or just a mix of things I've learned about.”

Seema said cooking was a way to ‘experience’ different foods and cultures that weren’t immediately available in Slough, adding:

“Living in Slough is interesting because there’s such a big Indian population and so much Indian food and good South Asian groceries.

“Growing up, I ate a lot of Indian and Pakistani food but there wasn't [much] else in Slough. You were restricted, but it meant the food we ate, I was more knowledgeable about.

“My school was majority South Asian and also my friends [which] meant I was never embarrassed about my culture, I never shied away from it and I got to embrace it.”

Seema said the ‘foundation’ of her cookbook is accessibility because the availability of niche ingredients was limited in Slough.

“I've always been cooking with the bare minimum, and what I realised, especially cooking online, is everybody's always commenting, can I use this instead?” she added.

This informed Seema’s cooking style, which involves making the most of simple, available ingredients while still creating 'delicious' food – thus inspiring the NOW chapter in her book.

“I think the importance of cooking for people that you love and spending time to eat together was engrained in us every day,” said Seema.

“There was always this community based around food. Food is not just a love language – it's a language in general. Even people in my family who don’t speak a lot of English – we can still communicate about food.”

Seema has created videos about more than 100 countries' national dishes – a project that made her online platform ‘blow up’.

“I realised more often than not that national dishes were simple foods anyone can make,” she said.

Her account @seemagetsbaked now has 1.3 million followers and 33.7 million likes on TikTok and over 541k followers on Instagram.

Seema says her content’s ‘authenticity’ and ‘relatability’ contribute to her success, adding:

“I feel like if there were 500,000 people in front of me, then I would feel nervous but behind the screen, you don’t feel it as much.

“I see it as a community but it's difficult to grasp how big it is. It’s almost dystopian to have all these people at your fingertips.”

The initial response to Craveable, published by Penguin Michael Joseph and officially out tomorrow (Thursday), has been ‘so positive’.

“Primarily for the representation – people are proud to see someone who looks like them because even now in the food space, there’s barely any South Asian girls doing it,” Seema added.

“It’s nice for people to see somebody who looks like them doing something that isn't pushed to do.

“I got to do all this for my mum and that makes me feel more proud of it.”