For the Love of Tinned Fish and Chicken Fat: Meet the TikTok Generation's Julia Child

To find some quick dirt on someone, Reddit is an obvious first stop. It's a breeding ground for snide comments left by anonymous users with too much free time. But even on a subreddit dubbed "Foodie Snark," where the strongly opinionated flock to share their grouchiest takes on food news, no one has anything but glowing things to say about Hailee Catalano, a TikTok-famous chef who built a following in the millions after she traded her work in professional kitchens for a life of documenting the cozy-elegant meals she makes for herself at home.

If Julia Child — the pioneering 1960s chef credited with making classical French cuisine accessible for American home cooks — had existed in the TikTok age, her reception would probably have been similar. Like Child, Catalano is bubbly, beloved, and enamored with food above (almost) anything else. If there's one thing she loves just as much, it's her partner Chuck Cruz — another Child-like quality of hers. (Though unlike Child's doting diplomat husband Paul, Cruz is also a chef himself.)

The two met in culinary school in 2013, where their classmates actually referred to Catalano as the Julia Child of their cohort. Catalano and Cruz were alphabetically destined to be paired up again and again for assignments like hand-crafting 400 stuffed grape leaves. When their teacher tasted the filling for their dolmas, she spat it out, forcing them to start over. They couldn't scrounge up enough rice for another batch of 400, so they failed — and they still laugh about how the traumatic experience made them a more resilient couple.

There are always pros and cons to building a life with someone who also excels at your craft. But Catalano and Cruz say they never get swept up in a feeling of competition — and that it's actually helpful to have the other one around to challenge each other's "culinary brains" and bounce recipe ideas off each other.

"We do push each other to be better, but it's not in a competitive way," Catalano tells PS. "It's nice to be around someone that also cares about food as much as me and thinks about it as intensely as I do."

Cruz agrees. "I always felt like it's really supportive," he says. "Everything we do is kind of collaborative in a way."

Aside from their latest shared venture, a TikTok channel called 2peoplecooking, Cruz was a critical collaborator on Catalano's new cookbook, "By Heart," just released this month. He provided constant moral support throughout the long drafting process, and also served as her main taste-tester, ultimately helping to fill the pages with recipes for fried squash blossom "mozzarella sticks," broccoli and soppressata sheet-pan pizzas, brie and butter sandwiches with shallot-y frisee, and figgy tapioca puddings. And though there are some new recipes in the mix, the overall feel of the book will be familiar for followers of Catalano's joyful online presence.

Fans feel it's that joy that makes her cooking stand out from the overcrowded world of internet chefs, where fads fizzle fast. While so much of TikTok has a self-conscious fixation on optimizing our bodies with "healthy" food — whether to lose weight, have clearer skin, or bulk up — some of Catalano's most gleeful recipes call for additions like chicken fat and lots of cheese. In a sea of sea moss smoothies and collagen Jell-O, Catalano's new book is a salute to cooking in a way that feels authentic to oneself and one's genuine love of good, balanced, deeply satisfying food.

"For me it's just like, I eat what I like to eat, and I feel like it's a healthier way to think. It's important to show that you can eat things like chicken fat. You can eat butter," she says. "I like showing a balanced life in food. That's just how I cook and how I eat."

There are certainly some food trends that have earned her stamp of approval, though, like how everyone is making their own sourdough. She also loves that everyone's eating tinned fish now, a longtime favorite of both Catalano and Cruz. The two tell a story of how, when Cruz was growing up, his mom would make sardines for dinner on the nights she didn't feel like cooking. It was just a simple meld of the tinned fish and tomato sauce with some sauteed onions, served over rice. He and Catalano still make it for each other sometimes.

In the early stages of their relationship, it was their parallel childhood food memories that brought the two together more than anything. They could both relate to the other's stories of being the only cousin in a big family who would happily eat artichoke or bitter melon. For Catalano, who included a section in "By Heart" titled "Inspired by Tina: Italian American Favorites," an early interest in cooking developed while watching her grandmother Tina make a big vat of Sunday gravy after church each week, for which there is a recipe in the book.

It was always chaotic in that kitchen, Catalano remembers, with her "loud, Italian family" and lots of kids running around. Through it all, though, Tina remained at the stove with an aura of bliss.

"She seemed so peaceful, just making her pot of gravy," Catalano says. "It was so nice to watch somebody bring everyone together through that."

She counts Julia Child as an inspiration, of course, and the Food Network giants of her youth like Rachael Ray, whose cookware she and Cruz used until just a couple years ago, when they upgraded to Made In sets. But if there was any one thing that made her into the chef she is today, whose heartfelt cooking touches millions, it was her grandmother's simple, steady hand as she stirred her weekly gravy.

Emma Glassman-Hughes (she/her) is the associate editor at PS Balance. In her seven years as a reporter, her beats have spanned the lifestyle spectrum; she's covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, and food, climate, and farming for Ambrook Research.