Nara Smith Announces Cookbook, Says She Doesn’t Identify As A “Tradwife”

If you have spent any time on TikTok in the last three years like me, you already know the feeling of stumbling across Nara Smith. You're lying there, minding your business, and suddenly there’s this gorgeous girl with splendid outfits on your screen, her soothing voice barely above a murmur, explaining calmly that she is making Oreo dupes from scratch for her children. Then you learn she’s not only a wife but a model and influencer, she travels, is in her early 20s, and you think: absolutely not. There is no way she is doing all of that. That is not something a real person does on a weekday afternoon.

Except she does. She really is that girl. Nara Aziza Smith, 24 years old, is a successful mother of four, wife to famous supermodel Lucky Blue Smith, and now a published cookbook author who has spent the last few years breaking the internet with her viral videos. Everyone – moms, cooks, Gen Z – watches her. So does the fashion world. Honestly, most people who stumble onto her page watch her, even if they cannot fully explain why. My guess is that they’re captivated by the aspirational life she has built. Maybe they’re ogling at her food, thinking, “How in the world do I make that from scratch?”

On October 13, all of those recipes she's been making on your phone screen become something you can finally taste. Her debut cookbook, Homemade, published by HarperCollins, contains 80 family-friendly recipes that pull from her German childhood, her life as a working mother, and the viral hits her followers have been requesting since she first started making cooking videos. Pork Schnitzel, pasta dough, plus cinnamon toast squares, chocolate sandwich cookies that are, by all accounts, better than the ones in the blue package. The dinner recipes are reminiscent of farm-to-table restaurants, like her soy-glazed flank steak with plum herb salad or her baked fall vegetable salad with miso-sherry dressing. And, how could we forget, Lucky Blue Smith's famous oat chocolate chip cookies.

"This cookbook means the world to me," Smith said on the HarperCollins site. "It holds the way I live and cook at home. It's about slowing down, making things with your hands, and finding whimsy in the everyday. I've put together the recipes that I cherish so much and are things I either grew up eating or now serve to the people I love most. They're simple, from scratch, and meant to be made and shared often."

"I just want people to realize that cooking isn't intimidating, especially making things from scratch," she told Vanity Fair. "If I can do it, they can do it too. There are recipes in the book that are super easy, or if you want to challenge yourself, you can make it a fun thing with your friends or family, or partner, or just yourself. Hearing, 'Oh, let's make bread' or 'Let's make mozzarella' — it seems so daunting. At least it did to me. So I want it to feel like a slight nudge. Like, 'No, you can do it. It's fine. I did it. You can do it too.'"

After the birth of Smith’s second child, she developed a severe case of eczema, and after a lot of trial and error, she realized that cutting out processed foods made a real difference in how she felt. Having grown up in Frankfurt and then relocated to the United States, she was already aware of how different the food culture was here, how much more processed everything tended to be, and the eczema made her look at all of it much more critically. "I had to adapt and make more things from scratch," she said. "And that's how the whole thing came about."

But why the designer clothes in the kitchen? She has a good reason for that, too. In 2023, with Lucky Blue Smith, one of the most famous male models of his generation, predominantly bringing in income, Nara was home with the kids and had a closet full of beautiful clothes she had nowhere to wear. So she wore them in the kitchen. "I started cooking in the outfits because I was like, I have no place to wear these clothes," she explained. "If I can at least make my daughter smile and think I'm a princess, I'm going to do that."

I've never quite understood where that title comes from because I don't know what is traditional about our life.

While Smith is loved by many, she’s also garnered some hate, with her name being dropped in conversations about the so-called tradwife trend. Smith has been lumped alongside Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm in countless think pieces about domesticity, feminism, and what women's content on social media says about the “propaganda” being pushed on women. Smith herself doesn't find the "tradwife" label particularly accurate, and neither does Neeleman. "I've never quite understood where that title comes from because I don't know what is traditional about our life," Smith said. "I am a full-time working mom. I work; so does Lucky. It's a modern relationship. I think it might've been because I love cooking, but cooking is my love language. It's a hobby of mine and it's my job. It's not something that I'm condemned to do."

So while her detractors like to pretend that the model is dressing up in feminine dresses to promote “trad” ideals, Smith says it’s really not that serious. "It's really odd, but I feel like I play a character and I get to be whatever I want to be for the day," she said. "And it depends on what I put on. If I want to put on a princess gown, I'll feel like a princess. If I want to put on something sleeker, I'll feel elegant. I love coordinating my outfits with the food I cook, whether that's a color scheme or a time era or a texture, and I love when people catch on to little references."

As for what comes after the cookbook, Smith has made clear she's thinking bigger than one book. "Ultimately, I'm building a culinary lifestyle empire, and we're only at the very beginning," she said. "The most natural thing to do is put this cookbook out, and then just continue building and sharing what I love with people all across the world."