Pinch of Nom: Comfort Food claims the Christmas number one

Kay Featherstone and Kate Allinson's Pinch of Nom: Comfort Food (Bluebird) has claimed the Christmas Number One, selling 56,367 copies.

The title is the authors' first to achieve the festive top spot and the first cookbook to do so since Jamie Oliver's 15-Minute Meals (Michael Joseph) in 2012. Despite seven other cookbooks topping the Christmas charts, Featherstone and Allinson join just two other chefs—Oliver and Delia Smith—as festive chart-toppers.

Comfort Food beat Richard Osman's The Man Who Died Twice (Viking) by just 1,107 copies in one of the closest Christmas Number One contests since records began. Only 2001 saw a closer battle, when Oliver’s Happy Days with the Naked Chef beat Smith’s How to Cook: Book Three by just 326 copies.

Osman's The Thursday Murder Club (Penguin) and The Man Who Died Twice reigned atop their respective fiction charts, with The Thursday Murder Club scoring a 29th week as the Mass Market Fiction bestseller and its sequel hitting 12 weeks atop Original Fiction. Marian Keyes' Rachel's Holiday (Penguin), released as a 25th anniversary edition ahead of its sequel Again, Rachel, charted eighth in Mass Market Fiction.

Comfort Food notched up a second week in the Hardback Non-Fiction top spot, with Tim Marshall's The Power of Geography (Elliott & Thompson) scoring a seventh week in total as the Paperback Non-Fiction number one. 

Ernest Powys Mathers' Cain's Jawbone (Unbound), reprinted by the publisher after going viral on TikTok, soared into the Paperback Non-Fiction chart in third place, selling 7,822 copies. The originally 1934-published literary mystery is said to have been solved by only one living person.

David Walliams and Tony Ross' Gangsta Granny Strikes Again! (HarperCollins) swiped the Children's top spot, as Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler's Squirrel's Snowman (Macmillan Children's) reigned in the Pre-School chart.

The market soared 13.6% in volume and 14.9% in value, to 9.3 million books sold to £86.1m. Though last week trailed the equivalent week in 2020 by 3.3% in volume and 4.3% in value, next week, leading up to the 25th, could spike even higher.