If you’re looking for dessert ideas for a late-summer picnic, B. Dylan Hollis has you covered. The Bermuda-born, piano-playing, kitsch-collecting TikTok sensation would like to recommend a few alternatives — or perhaps accompaniments — to Popsicles. Consider Kiskadee Fantasy Pie, a 1950s classic named for the yellow-bellied songbird, consisting of whipped cream, pineapple and meringue layered on a saltine cracker crust; or Banana Marlow, a marshmallow-based ice-cream confection that was all the rage in the 1930s; or Grasshopper Pie. Think crème de cacao, crème de menthe, cream cheese, green food coloring and crushed Oreos served on 1960s Melmac.
Recipes for these vintage delights can be found in Hollis’s best-selling cookbook, “Baking Yesteryear,” which is organized by decade with a special section reserved for the worst of the worst. Among them are Pickle Cheesecake, Jellied Meatloaf and Roughage Loaf — but not Pork Cake, the stomach-turner that brought Hollis’s pandemic-inspired TikTok account to a rolling boil. That one shows up in the 1910s.
Earlier incarnations of the recipes made their debuts in community cookbooks, those trusty, comb-bound, grease-stained, pencil-marked volumes that tend to crop up among the Milano cookies and Shredded Wheat in your grandmother’s kitchen. Hollis is evangelical on the subject of these oft-overlooked and unsung workhorses.
“Community cookbooks come from the church ladies and bridge clubs of the United States. They are the menus and the recipes of everyday folks. They’re a treasure trove of information,” Hollis said. He makes an excellent point: “You’re not going to find Velveeta fudge in an Anthony Bourdain cookbook.”
Hollis continued, “You have, say, a cookbook from the 1963 Methodist Church of Laramie, Wyo. From there you can see what the everyday person is consuming, interested in and serves their family in a small community, in a particular place in time. And that is magnificent to me.” If you cross-reference the Methodists’ recipes with, for example, a 1963 cookbook from a nursing home in Aspen, Col., you can spot regional ingredients, tastes and trends, not to mention hand-drawn predecessors to clip art in the margins.
Hollis now has close to 500 community cookbooks gathered from eBay, estate sales, antique stores and strangers who send them to his post office box. He tries to read one a day, although it’s taking a bit longer to plow through the 2000 recipes in his current pick, the 1968 Beta Sigma Phi International Cookbook of Desserts.
As for the ingredient Hollis has come to appreciate most in his culinary time travel, his answer is unequivocal: dates. In the 1910s and ’20s, he said, it wasn’t unusual for dates to appear in seven out of 10 recipes. He has a whole chapter on them in his book. He writes, “Though they look vaguely like cockroach eggs, their taste is incredibly rich and sweet.”
Elisabeth Egan is an editor at the Book Review and the author of “A Window Opens.”
