After getting curious about a vintage recipe for Pork Cake a few years ago, jazz musician B. Dylan Hollis posted a baking video on TikTok.
Now millions of people watch him whip up bizarre creations from centuries past.
"Suddenly I was going to estate sales and antique stores, looking for antique cookbooks and finding odd, wacky recipes in those. I've been a one-trick pony ever since."
B Dylan Hollis Photo: Lauren Jones
B Dylan Hollis is the author of Baking Yesteryear: The Best Recipes from the 1900s to the 1980s.
Mid-century recipes like Pork Cake – "a good, old-fashioned fruitcake with a pound of ground pork in it" – are a kind of time machine to decades past, Hollis tells Kathryn Ryan.
In the 1930s, American cities were hit the hardest by the Great Depression, and things like butter, eggs and milk were expensive and quite hard to come by, he says.
"That, in my mind, is some of the greatest things we can learn from cookbooks - that it is difficult times that lead to ingenuity and imagination."
Although not all of the recipes Hollis has baked are delicious – Water Pie, with a "texture rather of silicone" he doesn't recommend – he says many taste surprisingly good.
One of his favourites – an early 1930s recipe for Peanut Butter Bread – is a simple way to offer a dessert with just flour, peanut butter, a little milk and "an inordinate amount of baking powder".
"During the Great Depression, something that was widely available and cheap and stored well were peanut butter jars ... It had a little bit of added sugar at the time, it had great flavour, and it was a baking fat."
Chocolate Potato Cake, a 1910s recipe made with nearly a full cup of mashed potato, and the "very rich and very dense" Pinto Bean Cake, he also commends.
"It's got this lovely nutty sweetness from both the peanuts and the pinto beans and the sweetness from the honey. It's this combination of a fudgy cake with this lovely nutty flavour and it's phenomenal and I can't tell you why it works but it truly does."
The "glory days" of vintage baking drew to a close in the early '80s, Hollis says.
"After the 1980s, you see everything sort of meld together ... you don't get the great variety or the distinct recipes anymore."
He isn't sure what's to come from his TikTok baking adventures, says Hollis.
"Knowledge graces us over the years, and I simply don't think I've accrued enough of those to appreciate the position fully that I'm in.
'I'm a jazz musician ... I play 1940s, 1950s big band jazz. And [social media success] did fall into my lap through pure luck and experimentation.
"In a short time, this became one of the most fulfilling things I could ever occupy my time with – baking through history. I bake most every day and I'm so thrilled that it's found its way to me."
Alongside a taste of history, his favourite thing to serve followers is good vibes.
"Sometimes you just want some plain, good old-fashioned fun ... It's not that what I'm doing is anything particularly special, there just seems to be a dearth of just plain optimism and good fun.
"When you have fun on camera that comes across very well. And I'm not interested in the flashing lights of LA or anything like that. I just love to bake in my kitchen and yell and people seem to like it, too."
