Golly Miss Polly, your hobby’s a cookbook
Polly Markus never dreamed she’d become a foodie influencer when she started posting her recipes on Instagram during the first lockdown. Sarah Catherall reports.
Polly Markus started posting her recipes on Instagram during the first lockdown, when the only exciting outings happening in her life were daily trips to the supermarket.
It was a change of pace from her Auckland job in commercial real estate, which went quiet almost overnight.
‘‘Everyone was working from home so I had a lot of spare time. I always wanted to share recipes for family and friends, so I started doing that via Instagram.’’
Miss Polly’s Kitchen started sharing recipes and videos and she now has almost 50,000 followers and a cookbook.
Her success has been partly thanks to social enterprise Everybody Eats, which asked her to share a video and recipe in 2020 – exposure that Markus now credits with helping kick-start her career as a foodie influencer.
Growing up, she loved food and flavours, and her parents used to joke that ‘‘I was like the labrador. I would eat and eat and eat. Those who know me know that one of my biggest fears is going hungry’’.
Her father Les was the cook of the house – he died six years ago.
‘‘Dad was really well-travelled and he would cook all these delicious flavours, like Middle Eastern food and curries. My parents were always throwing dinner parties. I’ve always associated good food with having people around.’’
Markus left Auckland at 21 and was employed as a chef on a European superyacht for three years, despite her lack of chef training.
Working alongside a head chef, her job was to cook three meals a day for 15 crew – three proteins, a starch, and three salads. She picked up a range of cuisines from her international colleagues, including tuna tonnato – which features in her cookbook.
Markus returned to Aotearoa burnt out from her brief cooking career.
‘‘I was so sick of it. I had completely lost my love of cooking. I knew it would eventually come back but I didn’t think that at the time.’’
She toyed with the idea of opening a cafe in Auckland but her father died not long after she returned home, so she returned to a job in commercial real estate.
But back to Miss Polly’s Kitchen. What is it about her Instagram account that appeals when there are many others?
Markus thinks she connects and relates to people – ‘‘I laugh a lot,’’ she says – while her recipes are often simple and straightforward. ‘‘Some recipes you can throw in a blender and make some meat balls and you’ve got a meal.’’
Her Instagram profile took off when clothing brands Ruby and Maggie Marilyn got her to create lockdown recipes which they shared on their own sites. Their followers started following Markus, which had a domino effect.
Since then, she has worked with brands like Cloudy Bay, Ecoya and New Zealand Pork, which hire her to create and share recipes on their own sites. She is fussy about who she works with – always New Zealand brands she believes in.
The cookbook came about after a publisher at Allen & Unwin followed her for a few months, and then asked whether she might consider pulling together 70 new recipes
‘My parents were always throwing dinner parties. I’ve always associated good food with having people around.’
from scratch.
Markus laughs that she was relieved when Auckland had another Covid lockdown, which gave her the opportunity to meet her deadline.
‘‘I was creating dishes during lockdown and leaving them on my doorstep and friends and family would pick them up and tell me what they honestly thought of them.’’
Markus says she’s drawn to Asian and Middle Eastern dishes, and her cookbook recipes are fresh, flavoursome and healthy. She pulls back on anything too fried, but isn’t averse to using butter, sugar and salt.
Miss Polly’s Kitchen – the cookbook – is packed with bold and unique flavours and clever spins on classic dishes such as a chicken and rice bake flavoured with miso, and fish bites crumbed in lime and coconut.
She’s inherited her dad’s love of cooking and sharing food, and her gravalax salmon recipe is based on a dish she inherited from him.
‘‘I share it with pride,’’ she writes.
‘‘I’m a people-pleaser and a really social person. I love nothing more than preparing food while everyone relaxes, and then we sit down together and enjoy it.’’