“I’m very flattered, goodness gracious me,’’ she says of the many affectionate monikers people have bestowed upon her.

“After all these years of baking, I’ve come to be known by many as ‘Tasmania’s favourite nan’. It’s tremendous to be called all those things. But I don’t really consider myself to be any of those things. I’m just a nan, and I’m just crazy for baking, as many nans are. I just love to bake.’’

Of course the hugely popular self-taught home cook is playing down her achievements but her resume tells a different story.

Wise was named Tasmanian Senior Australian of the Year in 2019 and in 2021 she was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for services to the hospitality sector and the community.

Add to that the work she has done teaching practical kitchen skills to migrants, prisoners, domestic violence victims, school children and other community groups, plus the cooking school she has run for many years from her Molesworth home, as well as the many food festivals and public events she appears at, and the wealth of cookbooks she has published and it’s clear that Wise isn’t known for sitting idle.

Wise spent time during lockdown experimenting with recipes, producing her new book The Comfort Bake: Food that Warms the Heart, which will be released on Tuesday, March 1.

“It’s old-fashioned home cooking, big on comfort and low on fuss,’’ Wise explains. “It’s food that warms the heart.’’

With her cooking school temporarily closed due to social distancing requirements, Wise says the arrival of the pandemic was the perfect opportunity to experiment in the kitchen.

“It gave me the time as well as the opportunity to work on different recipes that I’d not used before, to invent new ones, and to add an interesting twist to some old ones,’’ she says.

So where does fresh inspiration come from for a woman who has already published a wealth of cookbooks, covering everything from preserves and slow cooking to sweets, family favourites and creating magic from leftovers?

“I really don’t know the answer,’’ Wise confesses. “I get out of bed in the morning and I just start cooking. It’s like tossing a whole heap of ideas and ingredients up in the air, figuratively speaking, and then feeding them into recipe ideas.’’

Wise has nine ovens of various types at her Molesworth property – she sometimes cooks in her own kitchen or, if she needs more space, ventures out into the adjacent cooking school building to bake.

And she finds great joy working with second-hand mixing bowls, baking trays and other well-made utensils from a bygone era that she picks up at thrift stores.

“I love it so much,’’ Wise says of op shopping for kitchenware. “Spoons, cake tins, you name it – pots, pans … anything that looks like it’s had a happy life in a kitchen, I’ll buy it immediately. You can pick up such good cooking equipment. And it’s such a privilege to own something that has been loved and baked with for all those years. I have shelves and shelves of it out in the cooking school. It’s easy to be inspired when you have all that at hand.’’

Fortunately, with so much food being produced, Wise also has no shortage of taste-testers on hand.

“Friends, neighbours, family members – anyone who walks through the gate, even delivery people,’’ she laughs. “Even people who come to the door with groceries or a parcel, I’ll say ‘Try this, I just made it’ If it’s a shocking hot day, I’ll offer them something to eat and pour a cold drink. You can bake on your own but the best thing about it is sharing it around. That’s what I love about cooking – it costs so little to give and share, but it can mean a lot to someone else.’’

Which is one of the reasons she wanted to create a comforting new book in the wake of the pandemic.

“Whether we’re in lockdown, no lockdown, isolation or not, these are unsettling times like we’ve never come across, really,’’ Wise says. “These recipes are comfortable and easy to bake, they are lovely to share with family.”

And she has deliberately used easily accessible ingredients that can be found at supermarkets – many aspiring cooks would already have many of the ingredients at home in their cupboards, pantries and fridges.

“The cherry pie on the front cover, it contains tinned cherries, not things that are hard to get,’’ Wise says.

“They’re just simple, basic ingredients – which are represented in all my books – with no-fail recipes that always come out tasty and delicious. “Ingredients like butter, sugar, flour, salt and olive oil – you can build on that and make incredible things from simple ingredients that are incredibly tasty.’’

Wise describes her collection of new recipes as being “like a warm hug in book form”.

She can still recall the scent of tasty treats baking in the homes of her two grandmothers in Hobart when she was a child.

“I go back to the aroma in my nans’ kitchens,’’ she says. “It felt like it wrapped itself around you, the promise of something lovely to eat just made you feel welcome. I just remember both my grandmothers’ houses smelling amazing.’’

Wise says it was her grandmothers who inspired her love of cooking.

“I always loved it from time I was a child – from the time I was about eight I was longing to cook,’’ she recalls. “I lived at Geilston Bay and I’d get the bus and then the trolley bus down to Nan’s [in Sandy Bay] and she’d let me cook anything I wanted. I was a messy cook but she didn’t care.’’

Wise remembers pikelets being one of her favourite things to cook back then – “for me they were exciting,’’ she says.

“My other nan was an absolutely fabulous cook as well,’’ Wise recalls. “My great grandparents – her parents – had a bakery when she was young. I went to live with her [at Rose Bay] when I was at university.’’

“She had a beautiful house overlooking the river, and she would just let me do whatever I liked. I was atrocious at bread dough but I was determined to master it. I’d have bread up the walls and bread rising in green buckets in the bathtub. And she didn’t care, she said ‘You just keep trying, you’ll get it in the end’. And I just love bread dough to this day.’’

Wise says she never tires of cooking, and the joy it brings her.

“I just feel wonderful when I cook,’’ she says. “My husband says if I’m happy I cook, if I’m sad I cook, if I’m grumpy or stressed I cook, because everything about it makes me feel wonderful. It’s my happy place, to coin that cliché. I just love being in the kitchen and baking is just wonderful and so is preserving, I just love everything about it.’’

Listening to Wise speak passionately about all things food-related and the success she has had over many years, it is hard to believe her cooking career was almost over before it began.

“I had failures at first,’’ Wise confesses of her cooking. “I had scrap books, as you did back in day, with cutouts from magazine of things I was going to make.’’

But her first attempts with these recipes after marrying her husband, Robert, in 1973 and renting a house in South Hobart were failures and Wise remembers being “heartbroken’’.

“It was going to be such an important part of my life, because I’d been dying to get my own kitchen,’’ she explains. “I had delusions of how successful and wonderful it was going to be.’’

Determined to succeed, Wise stopped relying on other people’s recipes and began to create recipes of her own.

And she found she had far better results.

Wise studied teaching at university but soon “got bored with it’’.

And as much as she loved cooking, she wasn’t convinced it was the career for her.

“I knew I wasn’t self-disciplined enough to be a chef, or skilled enough,’’ Wise says.

She and Robert had six children and Wise continued to develop her cooking and preserving skills while raising them.

She says while other parents were making playdough for their children, she was giving her kids bread dough to experiment with as they played alongside her in the kitchen.

Two of her sons attended TasTafe’s Drysdale Campus in Hobart and one of them spoke to a teacher about all the preserving Mum did at home.

From there, she was approached to share her knowledge on ABC talkback radio in a jams and preserves segment.

Much to Wise’s delight, the segment proved popular, and ultimately led her to publish her first cookbook.

“I can’t remember what day it is half the time or which way is up, but I can remember recipes in my head,’’ she says. “I was chanting out recipes to listeners and they’d say ‘Hang on, I can’t write that quickly’. So then I would post them out to people. Then people were saying ‘Please could you write cookbooks’, and I said ‘No, don’t be silly, I could never do that’. But I put pen to paper and Chris Wisby, who was the presenter then, said he’d help me with how to do it and who to contact and send it away, so I said ‘Ok then, yes’.’’

More cookbooks followed, some for fun, but others out of necessity.

One of her children was gluten intolerant and back then gluten-free foods on supermarket shelves were a rarity.

“There was not much you could buy that was edible,’’ Wise recalls.

So she created her own recipes and they came together in a cookbook.

“And eventually there was another, and then another,’’ Wise says of her prolific publishing.

The bulk of experimentation for her cookbooks was done when the family lived at Eaglehawk Neck. Here, Wise had 6m of kitchen bench space and enjoyed “looking out over the ocean near the Tessellated Pavement … it was just idyllic.’’

One of the things Wise finds so rewarding about cooking – apart from the personal joy it brings her – is sharing her skills with others.

Over the years she has cooked with migrants, soon-to-be-released prisoners and domestic violence victims, helping them to become confident cooks.

She also spent a few years teaching students at Tasman District School. And she was inspired to set up the Sally Wise Cooking School after purchasing her 2ha Molesworth property 10 years ago.

Wise says teaching people to cook is about far more than just food.

“Any opportunity that comes my way to demystify cooking for people, I’ll grab it with open arms,’’ Wise says. “Cooking is so easy, and it’s wonderful to be able to show people that and give them the skills they need to be able to cook for themselves and their families. It’s also a wonderful, companionable thing to do. It’s the catalyst to communication. You can chat as you cook and you learn so much from each other. I learn so much from other people all the time, so many generational tips are passed through. And even someone who considers themselves a not-so-great cook has tips that they share in conversation.

“You’re also quietly teaching maths, and science and literacy as well as numeracy. And teaching them just how wonderful food can be.’’

Wise, who attended Lindisfarne North Primary School, Rose Bay High School and Hobart Matriculation College, has fond memories of her own high school cooking teacher.

“I did cooking in years 7 and 8 and I have to say I had a cooking teacher that was wonderful,’’ Wise says. “I made a batch of scones one day and she said ‘These are beautiful’ – she just gave me such encouragement. Just the fact that she saw something I baked and said it was good … she didn’t know how much I really wanted to cook all the time. So I try and pass that on to kids. Things don’t have to be perfect. If something doesn’t turn out quite right or how you’d like it to look, then call it something else, it can still taste amazing.’’

When Wise first started on ABC Radio, her listeners were typically older than 50. Wise loves that there has been a shift and younger people are increasingly aware of cooking and preserves and the value of fresh, local produce. She still makes guest appearances on radio about once a month.

“Now young people are so engaged about where their food comes from, what additives are in their food, how their food was grown, where it was grown, food miles – all those things are so important to them and the health of their families … it’s really lovely to see,’’ Wise says.

“It’s so good that younger generations have picked up on this and are driving a movement to make sure our food is as good as it possibly can be.’’

Her son, Alistair Wise, trained under Gordon Ramsay in London and has since established North Hobart’s Sweet Envy (which he recently sold) and owns the Big Bessie ice cream truck. And while Wise says she can’t take any credit for her son’s “exceptional” cooking skills, she is pleased she may have planted the seed that led him to discover the wonders of a career in the food industry.

Wise says all her children have a keen interest in food, regardless of whether they work in the industry.

Son Andrew trained as a chef initially, working at Western Australia’s Cable Beach Club Resort and as head chef at Tasmania’s Cradle Mountain Chateau for many years before switching to the building industry, while another son, Elliott, is an electrician.

Daughter Stephanie previously ran Island Berries but now works at Lark Distillery, while two other daughters, Courtney and Philippa, have both worked in finance.

“They all have a passion for food, they all love it,’’ the doting mum says. “We have a lot of people around all the time, we’re quite a big family and there’s always something buzzing, we’re endlessly cooking and endlessly preserving.

“Various family members were around when I was developing recipes for the book, they’d say ‘The house smells so good’, and I thought ‘Yes – mission accomplished’.’’

And, Wise says, most importantly the love of cooking has continued into the next generation, with her nine grandchildren discovering a passion for food.

“Nothing makes me happier than baking alongside my grandchildren, which I do very often indeed – from the time they can stand on a special purpose-built stool at the bench,’’ she says. “Last week, as my tiny grandson Oscar, 2, happily and enthusiastically sprinkled crumble topping on apricots, ready for baking, I stood back and watched and thought ‘Life doesn’t get better than this’. My 14-year-old granddaughter Charly loves to cook so much that she found a part-time job in a local cafe during the school holidays. She was an invaluable help at the photo shoot for the book, cooking with a competence beyond her years. And my five-year-old granddaughter Freya absolutely loves to come here and cook her special favourite – apricot and blueberry muffins. Each of my grandchildren have their favourites, which I’ll cook for them if I know they are coming. It’s just lovely – it’s one of the privileges of older age and being a grandparent.

“Other nans are good at gardening, or sewing, or doing all sorts of craft work which I’m abominably hopeless at. But I do love cooking.”

Sally Wise’s new book The Comfort Bake: Food that Warms the Heart, photography by Samuel Shelley, Murdoch Books, (RRP $39.99) will be released on Tuesday, March 1.

To pre-order, go to https://www.booktopia.com.au/the-comfort-bake-sally-wise/book/9781922351937.html