Would you eat these vintage recipes?

From chocolate potato cake to jellied meatloaf, countless vintage recipes have been lost to time. TikTok star B. Dylan Hollis resurrects weird and wonderful dishes to see how they fare a century on.

If you find yourself falling down culinary rabbit holes on TikTok or YouTube, you’ve probably stumbled across B. Dylan Hollis and his vintage cookery videos.

The Bermudian, who now lives in a small Wyoming town in the US, has gained an ardent fanbase (he has 9.7million followers on TikTok alone) who love watching the enigmatic novice baker create dishes from long-forgotten cookbooks.

With little interest in cooking but “a love of yesteryear”, Hollis decided during the lockdowns of 2020 to start cooking from the vintage recipe books he’d been collecting.

“I found this recipe from the 1910s and it was a fruitcake that had a pound of ground pork in it. And I thought, ‘this is ridiculous, I’ve got to make it’. People on the internet like ridiculous things, so I recorded the process and the reception was wild. Before long, people were asking for more.”

So, what does a pork cake taste like? “It’s like a fruitcake with a question mark. It was quite common back in the day to use fatty meats – ground pork isn't too far from things like suet. You don't taste it as much as you would think. I liked it. I have since baked it with Jay Leno, Kelly Clarkson and The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri. For what it's worth, Kelly Clarkson liked it.”

Now a social media star, Hollis is taking the next step in his unexpected career and has a cookbook, Baking Yesteryear coming out in the summer.

A pitfall of his newfound fame is that it sometimes calls for him to make truly disgusting recipes – especially now that his fans have taken to sending him old recipe books they find.

Before choosing a recipe to cook, Hollis explains it has to meet his ‘three Ws’ rule: “It must fill at least one, if not all, of the descriptors of wild, wacky and wonderful.”

Here are five of Hollis’ best and worst.

Five of the best vintage recipes

Chocolate potato cake

“This 1912 recipe for a chocolate cake uses a russet potato to augment the flour. And instead of using cocoa powder or melted chocolate, it just has chocolate shavings. I love that because it is simple brilliance. It tastes old school with old school spices. Throwing a potato in a cake was not something I had thought of before but the taste was just incredible.”

Pinto bean cake

“I filmed this 1955 gluten-free bake recently and it was wild. Making a cake with a core substance of pinto beans, which ended up tasting incredible, means I'll never judge anything on the surface again. In addition to the beans, you add honey, ground peanuts, eggs and baking powder. It was phenomenal.”

Corn starch cookies

“A 1919 recipe, these cookies originate from Brazil where they’re called sequilhos – I described them as ‘a cloud of joy’ in my video. This recipe uses just three ingredients – corn starch, butter and sweetened condensed milk. They shouldn't taste so good considering how little goes into them and how simple they are to make. They blew my mind.”

Peanut butter bread

“Lots of my recipes come from the Great Depression – in those periods of hardship you get a combination of simplicity and ingenuity. You had to stretch the dollar as far as you could, and it just exploded people's imaginations.

“This 1932 recipe makes my top five because cooking it and eating it really placed me in time. I could imagine myself back then, having to make do with no butter and no eggs, thinking, ‘let's use a jar of readily available peanut butter’. It was amazing.”

Potato candy

“The 1933 potato candy is an old American Midwestern candy where you mash up a potato then add what must have been a month's supply of powdered sugar. It becomes a fondant – but made of potato. You roll it out, slather it in peanut butter and roll it up again. Potato candy. It tasted good even though it’s just absurd. You wonder how someone came up with it.”

Frog eye salad

“In America, there are salads which aren’t really salads. This 1968 recipe is one of them, with cream, mandarins, pineapple and even marshmallows in it. Except, it's not bound by sweet coconut or something; it's bound by acini di pepe, which is pasta that’s the size of couscous. And it was just awful.”

Great Depression water pie

“A lot of people like these pies but that might be because some versions include vanilla. This was an authentic recipe that didn’t. You make a basic pastry then add water and sugar, and top with butter. It tasted like wet lint. It was just awful.”

The roughage loaf

“This was a health food recipe from 1892. It was wheat germ and flaxseed, molasses and prunes – and it was terrible.”

Jellied meatloaf

“I often say this is the worst recipe I’ve tried. It’s from 1931 and is like cat food. The ground beef is cold and slimy, and it's set in a casket of gelatine made from beef broth. It was revolting. It almost made me angry because of the convoluted process and the care I took to get it right.”

Seafood mousse

“This 1972 recipe is on the same level as the jellied mousse: cat food again. It’s tinned crab meat with celery, Worcestershire sauce, tabasco, salt and onion powder. Then you boil a tin of cream of tomato soup and cream cheese, add gelatine and lots of mayonnaise. Then that’s mixed with the crab mix and chilled. Creamy seafood bound in gelatine.

“As you can tell, I'm not a fan of these kinds of dishes, but they were popular – they were bona fide creations. They’re just not made for modern tastes.”

Originally published February 2023.