There are so many hugely visible cooks – Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Nigella Lawson, to name but a few. And yet the pair who have brought us Pinch Of Nom, the fastest-selling cookbook of all time, prefer to remain out of the spotlight.

Kate and Kay Allinson – partners in work and in life – don’t do book tours, rarely agree to interviews and have no intention of jumping on to the celebrity bandwagon with cookery shows or reality TV appearances.

“Our agent’s favourite word is ‘no’,” Kay, 37, says wryly. They remain quite happy to produce their slimming, healthy eating books without the fanfare of fame.

“We get invited to a lot of stuff,” she continues. “We were invited to go on Pointless Celebrities and I was like, ‘No! No one is seeing on national TV how stupid I am!’”

“We shy away from a lot of things,” Kate adds. “We are really private people. Nom has never been about us. We just came up with an idea.”

Today, we meet over Zoom where they are sitting opposite each other in their relatively modest kitchen in The Wirral. Kay is the bolder, bigger personality, the one who heads up the tech operation which helped make their website and online audience the success it is.

Her partner, Kate, 51, who she married in a small but wacky Star Wars-themed wedding at a hotel in the Lake District last year, is the trained chef, the one who creates the recipes which have made the books a household name. She owned a restaurant in The Wirral before Nom came about.

Pinch Of Nom remains the UK’s most visited food blog with an online community of more than three million followers. To date, they have sold more than 4.3 million books in the UK alone.

“Numbers scare the hell out of me, but I think our books are in one in seven households in the UK, which is mental. Very cool, but very weird,” Kay muses. “To us, though, it’s not about us. It’s always been about our readers and Nom.”

Perhaps their success is down to their relatability with their readers. The Nom idea came about after the pair went to their local slimming club in the Wirral and found a lot of people couldn’t cook, or didn’t know what to do with basic ingredients. They started a website in 2016, posting their own recipes and launching a Facebook page soon afterwards. The rest is history.

It’s become harder to retain their privacy, and they are sometimes recognised when they least expect it. Kate, for instance, recalls how she was recognised in hospital when she was having minor surgery earlier this year.

“About eight hospital staff were there, asking me what I did. I told them I wrote cookbooks and one asked, ‘What cookbooks?’ I said Pinch Of Nom and there was this gasp from behind me and one of the nurses said, ‘We’ve all got those books!’”

The couple, who met online, have been together for 18 years and it was a mutual decision to tie the knot, they say.

“A lot of people said, ‘Why has it taken you so long to get married?’ and the easy answer is work,” Kay explains. “We’ve always lived and worked together and work has always got in the way of us.”

“There was no grand gesture – we didn’t have engagement rings for years,” she continues.

Although they didn’t wear Star Wars costumes for the big day, preferring jeans and sparkly trainers, guests enjoyed baby Yoda cocktails, sat at tables adorned with knitted Star Wars characters and signed the Millennium Falcon guestbook. Even their wedding rings are Star Wars-themed.

There were nods to their recipes at the wedding meal, but Kay can’t remember what she ate. “I had so much tequila that night – Kate had to put me to bed,” she recalls, chuckling.

They do find the boundary between home and work difficult.

“We can’t work in the same room together because Kay is just the complete opposite to me,” says Kate. “She likes music blaring out, I like quiet; she fidgets, so I can’t concentrate. We have separate offices.”

They moved house in 2020, completing on the day before the first lockdown. This resulted in the removal services cancelling, and the couple ended up moving all their possessions in their car over several journeys.

Kate’s test kitchen was finished just before then, but it wasn’t used for 18 months – all the testing had to be done at home.

Despite the setbacks, their fifth book, Pinch Of Nom: Enjoy, has just been published, featuring their trademark bold flavours and mouth-watering recipes such as chicken piccata, Chilean-style steak and fries, and banana bread brownies.

Kate doesn’t think there’s more pressure with each book, and is more concerned with keeping tabs on which recipe has been done before – whereas Kay worries if people are going to like the new dishes.

Thankfully, the business was not affected by the pandemic. “We were really lucky because people were home more, they were cooking more and we felt almost guilty about the fact that our business didn’t suffer when we were seeing lots of local businesses going under, especially restaurants and pubs, which is where we started,” says Kate.

Even though Pinch Of Nom focuses on slimming recipes, dieting is a difficult word for the duo.

“Dieting is a funny word. When you hear the word diet it elicits a response which is quite pressured,” Kay observes. “I’ve lost about five stone over the past year.

“I still weigh a lot, but I’ve always struggled with my weight since I was a kid. I was bullied at school. I’ve had a tricky relationship with food, but over the past couple of years I’ve put a lot of work into just not putting too much pressure on myself. It’s so easy to become obsessed with it.”

As for the fortune they have amassed from their Nom empire, Kate reflects: “We are still dealing with it, emotionally. It’s nice to not have to worry if you want something. We were at one time living off £50 a week. And [the money] has meant that we can do more to help people who helped us in the past when we were broke.”

They think of luxuries in terms of being able to pay the garage bill if the car breaks down, or settling the vet’s fees for their two dogs and two cats.

Kay observes: “The pressure has been really difficult. We have people who work for us now, and the enormity of the books and all of that pressure gets to me. The money has made life a little easier, but it also brings with it a lot of challenges.”

As for Christmas, most of their fare will be ‘Nommed’, Kay explains.

“The only gravy we’ll have is your gravy,” she says, talking to Kate. “The only pigs in blankets are your pigs in blankets. We just won’t go to excess.”

“Although we may splash out on some extra special stuffing,” Kate suggests. “And maybe a bit of bread sauce.” Just like their readers.

Pinch Of Nom: Enjoy by Kate and Kay Allinson is published by Bluebird, priced £20. Available now