THE COOKBOOK TEST #0005: ‘BAKING YESTERYEAR’ BY B. DYLAN HOLLIS

INSTALLMENT #0005 (FREE) / TRUST BUT VERIFY / TOMATO SOUP CAKE / CARROT PIE / POTATO DOUGHNUTS

Dear Readers,

I have a very hard time trusting any professional baker who doesn’t have a “butter versus shortening” opinion when it comes to pie crust. New media superstar B. Dylan Hollis includes a pie crust recipe in BAKING YESTERYEAR: THE BEST RECIPES FROM THE 1900s TO THE 1980s that lets the reader choose aimlessly between butter and shortening as though they were interchangeable, as opposed to the very keys that determine the character and success of the final food. (For what it’s worth: my go-to crust uses a 3:2 butter:shortening ratio to build a durable, reliable, flakey, tasty crust that is a genuinely pleasing workhorse.)  

Hollis repeatedly styles himself throughout Baking Yesteryear as an amateur, a lovable ingenue, and a harmless dabbler. Meanwhile: he talks about his international rise to fame on TikTok, his millions of fans, and baking with the likes of Kelly Clarkson and Jay Leno in his beautifully produced, professionally published cookbook. If you’ve seen his videos, you know that for all his goofing around, this guy is absolutely not goofing around - his cooking segments pack a Martin Short-style manic intensity while still hitting all necessary production points and rendering a coherent story. His videos feel as though the wheels are always about to fly off, but they never do - that’s the mark of a pro’s pro.

Anyhow: at this level, you don’t even need to have your own “butter versus shortening” opinions - you can pay someone to have them for you, and explain them at length in writing that sounds like your own voice. He should’ve done that.

The day I bought Baking Yesteryear with the intention of test-driving and reviewing it, a culinary email from Bake it Write hit my inbox, with Baking Yesteryear as its top story. “Blast,” I thought, “someone’s beaten me to it.” But no: It was another declaration of interest in the book’s content without any attempt to verify it: 

Excellent. Time to fire up the oven and deep-fryer then, and determine what’s what.

At your service,

James

BAKING YESTERYEAR
BY B. DYLAN HOLLIS
DK | Penguin Random House / 255 pages  / 2023 / $32

Baking Yesteryear is a collection of baking recipes organized chronologically - from the 1900s to the 1980s - without a lot of additional fuss or context. The organizational method could have been an opportunity to dive deeply into baking history, but introductions to recipes are brief, sparse, and generally read as little more than a Wikipedia glean glossed over with a bit of icing. 

Most recipes in the book could use a little more context - comparisons to modern equivalents, how to use them (or why not to use them) in the context of a meal, even more heartfelt personal reactions or recollections from the author about making them, rather than a starchy intro followed by a neatly presented list of ingredients and instructions. For a book subtitled “The best recipes from the 1900s to the 1980s” there isn’t much evidence presented that there’s anything all that great about many of the book’s selections.

That aside: The book serves up a lot of delightful, intriguing, inviting bakes, has plenty of witty and charming portraits of the author, and it’s a breezy romp through the decades, plus a playfully hostile “Worst of the Worst” chapter that collects the likes of Pickle Cheesecake and Prune Whip Pie.

It’s easy to grouch from the sidelines but Hollis has ultimately done a lovely job of curating this collection, and the overall look of the book is an A+, particularly if you like to look at a lot of pictures of Hollis and/or vintage cars.

TOMATO SOUP CAKE

At first glance, Hollis’s 1950s Tomato Soup Cake is nothing more than a basic-ass spice cake in a loaf pan, plus a can of condensed tomato soup. That, however, is a pretty good start from where I’m sitting - I am a huge fan of spice cakes (and/or anything made with molasses) as they’re old-timey in the best possible way - not teeth-jarringly sweet, with real depth of flavor instead of just a sugar icicle stabbed directly into the brain.

Assembling the cake is absurdly easy. You grease a loaf pan and heat an oven to 350 F. You mix 1 tsp of baking soda with a can of condensed tomato soup. You mix two cups of flour with 1 tsp each of cinnamon, ground cloves, and ground nutmeg, plus ¼ tsp of salt. And you cream 2 Tbsp of butter with 1 cup of sugar. Combine all three without overmixing, dump into the pan, and bake for 45-55 (see note below.) For frosting: cream 3 oz. of cream cheese in a stand mixer, and 3 Tbsp whole milk, and then gradually add 3 cups (yes, cups) of powdered sugar. 1 oz. of melted bitter chocolate, 1 tsp of vanilla extract, and ¼ tsp of salt are then mixed in to finish; beat until the frosting is smooth and cover the cool cake.

The cake, as a finished food, is absolutely decent and the tomato disappears into the mix without much of a trace. The cake’s spice level is intense without being overwhelming, and the moist chocolate cream cheese frosting brings sweetness and richness that complements the cake itself. My only production note for this extremely straightforward recipe is that it calls for a 45-55 minute bake at 350 F. At about 30 minutes, my “this smells done” sensors started pinging relentlessly. At 40 minutes, I yielded to intuition and skewered the cake. Totally done! Bit overdone, to be frank. It probably needed 30-35 minutes total. Still, the frosting saved it, and I was able to serve it to a group including three appreciative kids (10 and younger) without anyone objecting to any aspect of the dish. A post-dessert announcement that there was tomato soup in the cake produced the anticipated wave of shock and horror, and it was not requested for future meals or snack times, so we’ll mark it down as a mixed success.

CARROT PIE

Continuing the theme of “vegetables popping up in places where they are not necessarily expected” is the book’s Carrot Pie, which is a pretty close stand-in for a pumpkin pie, minus the pumpkin, plus about 1.5 pounds of peeled, sliced carrots that are simmered to a soft texture and then blended up with the rest of the ingredients to yield a creamy pie filling that sits in a par-baked crust.

Independent of the fact that it’s a lot quicker to pop open a can of pumpkin than boiling carrots for half an hour, the finished pie didn’t … well, it didn’t taste great. It wasn’t bad, initially, but the spices and sweetness and even appearance were so close to a pumpkin pie that when the filling offered that aggressive, almost radish-like pep of carrots it felt like an off-flavor or uncanny valley misfire of a pumpkin pie rather than being a completely different sort of pie entirely. “Unpleasant without being disgusting” sums it up; we tried a bit of pie and then binned it.

The carrot pie was also done about 10-15 minutes before the early part of the baking range, which makes me suspect that Hollis’s oven is running a little low, or he’s just overly conservative about thoroughly cooked baked goods.

POTATO DOUGHNUTS

Potatoes? In doughnuts? In this economy?! Well, honestly, this recipe from Baking Yesteryear doesn’t seem like the worst idea in the world (as potatoes are creamy and famously fry up pretty well.) And I’ve tried a number of homemade doughnut recipes throughout the years and never really settled on one that was reliable and reliably tasty. 

The recipe is a real slog, with about two hours of lead time before you even start frying. First you boil some potatoes until tender, then you mash a cup of ‘em with butter, then you mix up a pile of ingredients (eggs, sugar, yeast, flour, spices, baking powder and soda, buttermilk, vanilla), THEN you let the dough rise for an hour. After that, you can roll out, cut, and finally fry your doughnuts. Then you cover them in cinnamon sugar. There’s a reason doughnut making is usually left to professionals: It’s a humongous pain in the ass.

This recipe worked out just fine, but had a couple of major stutter steps. One is that it calls for 4-5 cups of flour, a significant variation. I scoured the recipe for some sort of explanation (“add flour until the dough achieves thus-and-such a texture,” “reserve one cup of flour to dust your work surface as needed,” etc.) and didn’t find one. In the end I used 4.5 cups of flour and obtained satisfactory doughnuts.

The other major problem is quantity. The recipe calls for cutting out ½” deep doughnuts and suggests that the yield is about 5 dozen. Some of my doughnuts were probably closer to ¾”, but I still only got about 18 out of the dough. For my purposes (a gathering of seven family members and friends), this was just fine, but if you’re planning to use this recipe to feed a crowd, you’ll want to scale up (or scale down your doughnut size) accordingly.

Complaints aside: these are tasty old-school doughnuts. Their exterior was pleasingly crispy, their interior was firm but lighter-than-expected, and almost creamy thanks to the potatoes. None of our tasters suspected potatoes were the secret ingredient, and everyone liked them (or liked them a lot.) Of the three Baking Yesteryear recipes we tried, this was the clear winner.

THE VERDICT ON BAKING YESTERYEAR

(BUY IT/ BORROW IT / ***BROWSE IT*** / SKIP IT / BURN IT)

Neither an authoritative deep history nor a trouble-free collection of slam dunk recipes, Baking Yesteryear is a casually curated collection of bygone curiosities. If there’s anything vital in here, we didn’t spot it, and the surfacey introductions to the recipes didn’t do much to highlight the must-bakes. Hollis seems like a legitimately charming guy, and the book is beautifully photographed and easy to browse, and so it would make an ideal gift for anyone already into his TikTok exploits. But it’s no kitchen necessity.

GO FORTH AND SEEK OUT ...

Any church basement cookbook. Flea markets, antiques stores, garage sales, and older relatives’ disused bookshelves are rife with locally made, poorly tested, incredibly irregular old-fashioned recipes that have a lot of the same “WHAT THE HELL” factor as the stuff Hollis spotlights, minus the polish but with the added benefit of you experiencing an extremely niche product that would otherwise languish in obscurity. I’m not saying you should cook out of these, necessarily (I’d advise against it, unless you feel confident that you know what you’re going to get), but they’re a great read, and a window into two recent bygone eras of American home cookery - the One Step Removed from the Pioneer Days Era and the Everything Is Conveniently Packaged in Boxes or Cans! Era.