Heather Brown’s first foray into social media fame came with a bit of gentle-hearted controversy.
An early video posted to her TikTok page in 2021 showed her steps in preparing a traditional Newfoundland Jiggs Dinner with a quite-modern pressure cooker, placing her salt meat, carrots, peas and potatoes all inside at once.
It was a relative jackpot — within a few hours, she had racked up six hundred views and dozens of comments, with many asking how exactly she managed to fit such a big meal in a tiny pot.
“Looking back now, the video was awful quality wise,” she said. “But as there was some interest sparked in that video, it kind of got me interested and curious. And it just started the journey of learning about social media.”
Three years later, a regular video for Mrs. Brown’s Kitchen — Brown’s Facebook and TikTok pages — garners tens of thousands of views, split up among her 800,000 combined followers on all platforms.
“I try to take stress out of it for people,” she said. “A lot of people want easy and quick, and sometimes people are intimidated by complicated recipes. But I try to make it that they’re not intimidating or not stressful.”
The content operation has morphed into something like a full-time job. Brown said it keeps her busy, alongside a set of continuing education courses she’s taking to further her career in health care.
“You can’t just take a break,” she remarks. “I feel like there’s that pressure there, right?”
She’s posted six original recipes videos over the past week, along with other highlights. The recipes she features are not all Newfoundland traditions — but her home province gets its fair share of attention, including a more recent in-depth tutorial about how to perfect the pressure cooker version of Jiggs Diner.
Lately, Brown has parlayed her rising social media fame — she racks up another thousand or so followers every day — into a book deal. She’ll publish a cookbook for Newfoundland publisher Flanker Press this fall.
“It’s a bit of a challenge. Like I’m used to being able to physically show all the food through a whole video. Now I get one picture,” she said.
“I have to put it into sentence form, it’s definitely a learning curve.”
The book is set to publish in September.
Brown credits her partner, Shelly, with keeping her on grounded — and keeping the content flowing. The positive feedback she gets from viewers around the province has also proven to be quite helpful.
“I got a message from somebody who has a child with cerebral palsy and as part of the Easter Seals Christmas Party fundraiser … they did up this whole spread from Mrs. Brown’s Kitchen,” she said. “There was an activity at that event for people to make those candies. “That stuff happens a lot. And that’s part of — I just love that stuff, I love it.”
