If you’re looking for a serious baking cookbook of well known, classic recipes, Baking Yesteryear is not the cookbook for you. And I mean that in the best way.
You may have heard of some of these recipes, they might be your own family favorites. But, you will also find flavor and ingredient combinations that you would never have thought of yourself. Luckily, B. Dylan Hollis has done the experimenting for us.
Baking Yesteryear, The Best Recipes from the 1900s to the 1980s was born out of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic hit while Hollis was in college studying music. Classes at the university he attended went completely online and like many of us, he was stuck at home. To pass the time, he started posting non-baking videos to TikTok.
Looking for other video ideas, he went to his vintage cookbook collection of community cookbooks from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Bermuda. In August 2020, Hollis uploaded his first baking video: Pork Cake. Yes, the recipe is in the book, on page 50. Yes, there is ground pork in it. No, I haven’t been brave enough to try it.
With no baking or cooking experience, he learned as he went. And the internet loved it – he has millions of followers on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Sometimes, he tries out recipes and taste tests them for the first time on camera. Some are good, some are terrible. But, it’s all entertaining.
The cookbook is arranged by decade, one chapter for each decade from the 1900s to the 1980s. There are also introductory sections for novice bakers, explaining common baking terms, equipment, and ingredients. Each recipe starts with a commentary by Hollis about the history of the item or his experience with it.
Hollis is funny, irreverent, sometimes outright raunchy. His online personality is perfectly reflected in his writing – it’s obvious that he was intimately involved in creating his cookbook. This is one of my favorite cookbooks to just sit down and read through. One classic example of his style of humor: the section on the 1960s starts off with, “In many ways, the 1960s were just like the 1950s – they were both decades.”
And, for those of you looking for a real adventure, there is a small Worst of the Worst section. Bake at your own risk!
