Book Review: Baking Yesteryear: The Best Recipes From the 1900s to the 1980s by B. Dylan Hollis

Baking Yesteryear: The Best Recipes From the 1900s to the 1980s
by B. Dylan Hollis (641.815 Hol)

Baking Yesteryear is a traditional baking cookbook, from a non-traditional source. Author B. Dylan Hollis grew up on Bermuda, fascinated with things of a bygone era. When he came to the U.S. in 2014 to enroll in a music school, he later found himself cooped up in isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A budding humorist, he had experimented with the TikTok short video format to create some comedy videos, but nothing seemed to click. Until he grabbed a dusty old cookbook of a shelf, created a humor video of himself making a vintage recipe of “Pork Cake”, and shared it with the world of the Internet. Combining Hollis’ hyperactive sense of humor, his tightly cut and edited videos have racked up millions of fans and hundreds of millions of views. The only logical thing for him to do next…was consolidate some of his (and his fans’) favorite recipes into a singular cookbook. And that is Baking Yesteryear.

 

90% of Baking Yesteryear is traditional cookbook format — recipes with traditional ingredient lists and preparation instructions. The remain 10% is Hollis lending his acerbic, hyper-intelligent wit to each recipe’s introduction. The other big selling point for this book is the recipes he selected — they come from a wide variety of sources, and most are recipes you’re not likely to have encountered anywhere recently (outside of his TikTok videos), unless you’re a collector of rare and obscure cookbooks from other historical eras.

Especially appreciated are the beautiful color photographs that accompany every single recipe in this this book. This should be an enjoyable read for anyone who is a fan of Hollis, anyone who loves cookbooks, anyone who loves baking, and anyone with a sense of humor about food and food history.

 

( publisher’s official Baking Yesteryear web page ) | ( official B Dylan Hollis TikTok feed )

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

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