B. Dylan Hollis blew up on TikTok by baking and tasting wacky recipes from America’s past

Have you ever wondered what America’s past tastes like?

B. Dylan Hollis has, and has turned that curiosity into a social media phenomenon. His TikTok videos show him baking and then trying dishes like water pie, 7UP Jell-O Salad and potato donuts.

Hollis has also written two cookbooks. The second is called “Baking Across America: A Vintage Recipe Road Trip.” He’ll be at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe on Monday, June 23, to talk about it.

Hollis joined The Show to discuss how he finds all of these vintage recipes he makes and more.

Full conversation

B. DYLAN HOLIS: I had always been a collector of old things, so I collected old vacuum tube radios, I collected old records and books. A my daily driver on the front of this cookbook, “Baking Across America,” is my 1963 Cadillac. I called him Ernest after country musician Ernest Tubb.

And when the pandemic rolled around I was looking for recipe ideas I had never really baked before — looking for video ideas, rather. And I was going through my old collections and I came across this old 1915 Five Roses flour cookbook. And in there it had a recipe for a pork cake.

MARK BRODIE: Mmm.

HOLIS: Which is just a fruit cake with a pound of ground pork in there. And that was my first sort of cookbook experience. And they said, “Look, the internet needs to find out about this. I want to show them that this is a real recipe in print.” And I baked that online. And the response was immediate, and it was heavy. And people really were interested in this.

So circle back to your question. Folks started sending me in these cookbooks. They would mail them to me, to my post office box during 2020, 2021. And I even got a few calls from my post office saying, “Hey, you've got too many books here. Can you please come pick them up, Mr. Hollis?”

So what started as just perusing antique stores and estate sales, they then began to come to me. And it was a hard time. I now have a bit of a library of old cookbooks in my house.

BRODIE: What appeals to you so much about old things?

HOLLIS: Hmm. There's a certain weight, a certain power to them, that you can pick up and interact with things that were created 100, 60, 70 years ago. And you can sort of imagine yourself interacting in the same manner that the folks who were interacting with them when they were around first. You get that sort of connection.

And with recipes specifically, the fact that you can time travel really poignantly. I mean, you can take a look at an old photograph or an old movie, and you can kind of see the sights and get the gist. But with an old recipe, with an old cookbook, not only can you pick it up and feel something directly from 1930, but you can then recreate that recipe, bake it, and then taste it just the same as it was 100 years ago.

And that's a very powerful thing to me, and it's really exciting to be able to do that because it's a direct sort of path to history. It's a doorway that you open up.

BRODIE: Well it sounds like in some cases you might not be able to watch a video of what something looked like at the turn of the 20th century, but you can taste what that time period tasted like.

HOLLIS: Yes. And sometimes that's for the better and sometimes it's not. You know, think of the 1920s. Right there in 1929, the bottom fell out from lot of countries’ economies. And they had to make do with what they had.

I think of a 1929 recipe from up in Canada, for example, it's called pudding chomeur, basically translates to “an unemployed pudding.” So it was just a combination of real pantry ingredients flavored by maple syrup. But people still wanted dessert during a time of of difficulty. And that's the really cool thing about bringing together what you got to put something fun on the table.

BRODIE: Well, it sounds like you have come across some recipes that maybe would have been better off left in the past.

HOLLIS: Yeah, I do. I think of the pork cake, of course, that I mentioned to you. Everyone can get a hold of butter and fats and lard, and you don't have to approximate any more by adding in a pound of fatty pork.

BRODIE: What stands out to you about maybe things that you have learned about history by doing this? You mentioned sort of Depression-era recipes are kind of what you have and what you could get and maybe what you could afford. Are there other things that you have sort of picked up about history by doing this?

HOLLIS: Yeah. You find dialog and commentary on things. And sometimes it's a matter of status. I think of when refrigeration first came on the scene — 1920s-1930s — it really started to enter the American household, but it was still a very expensive thing. So to have a refrigerator was very special.

So you would start seeing these recipes that incorporated gelatin and gelatin molds because they did require refrigeration. So to be served one of these things at a dinner party at your neighborhood friend's house — perhaps you didn't venture into the kitchen, but if that came out on your table, then you started saying, “Oh, this person is rather affluent.” So the deluge of these gelatin recipes started sort of as a status symbol.

So yeah, there's recipes like that. They can, they can be approached from a different angle, the angle of trying to impress.

BRODIE: So let me ask you about a recipe from this neck of the woods: prickly pear cheesecake. And I have to tell you that while some of the recipes that you've dealt with sound truly disgusting, this one sounds actually really very tasty.

HOLLIS: Yes. And I have to mention that, of course in my cookbooks, most of that which I put in there is, of course, very good.

Down in Arizona — now we've got three recipes that I featured in “Baking Across America” for Arizona. And the prickly pear cheesecake is on the more touristy side. When we think of the classic bakes and the classic flavors from states, some flavors aren't so much of a state, of Arizona, but sort of thrust upon it.

Now there are prickly pear. There's plenty of prickly pear cacti in Arizona, but you're not out eating it every day, are you?

BRODIE: No, we're not.

HOLLIS: But it is very good. And when you go to any sort of tourist spot, you go to Saguaro National Park, you go to the gift store, you're going to find prickly pear X, Y, and Z. And of course, that's on the surface. But it's also very good.

So prickly pear as a flavoring in desserts and baked goods. It's a great note. And I really wanted to apply that to a cheesecake. And there were a few prickly pear cheesecakes in my old cookbooks, and I sort of lay them out: all of the prickly pear recipes from community cookbooks from Arizona from 1960s, all the way up to 1990s.

And I bake them all and I say, “OK, this is what this one did well, this is what this one didn't.” And you come out with a distilled, really great recipe for prickly pear cheesecake.