Cover story, The Mail, You Magazine @pollypocketsy TikTok star

The Cork Catchphrase Cook: TikTok sensation @PollyPocketsy

 

When you hear her accent narrating her colourful cooking videos, it’s easy to tell Paulette O'Mahony hails from Cork. Her online persona, @Pollypocketsy, is a hit on TikTok, with over 1.4 million followers and over 60 million views of her videos.

She’s become TikTok famous for teaching her simple, easy recipes that often have just a couple of ingredients.

In these chatty videos, the self-taught cook borrows from all kinds of influences, including skills she learned from her parents growing up in Fairhill, Cork, and cookery courses taken while travelling through Thailand, Vietnam, and China. With one cook book already published in America, @Pollypocketsy “ just wants to show everyone that cooking healthy food isn’t that hard”.  Her videos are entertaining; but Paulette is also highly skilled at making quick, delicious food, and her fans are growing by the thousands every month.

We chat to her about her childhood in Cork, taking care of her disabled mother, growing vegetables in Germany, and how she turned the necessity to cook for her family into her dream career.

Summer 2022 saw her first book published, Oh So Tasty, which is currently only available in the US. Nearly half of her 1.3 million followers are scattered throughout America

“My aim with Oh So Tasty and future books that I plan to write is really just to show people that anyone can make food in minutes. Everyone can cook if they just set aside a little bit of time and patience. I want people to know that it's easier than it looks nearly all of the time.”

Advice for anyone starting out in Tiktok: "Depending on what your niche is, look up what length videos Tiktok want when you are starting, because they want different length videos at different times. I’d just say to anyone starting out, don’t get disheartened. It took me ages to get lots of followers on Instagram. I only had a couple of thousand until one of my videos went viral.” Since December last year, she has amassed over 470,000 followers.

She hopes to get some cookery books published this side of the world, but in the meantime, you can see her daily online on either Instagram or TikTok. She's given us some of her favourite recipes to try at home. 

Follow @pollypocketsy on Tiktok and Instagram. Follow the link in her bio, and it will link directly to all her recipes on the Whisk website.