Bobby Hicks Knows the Best Dishes Have a Side of Nostalgia

Your next family-favorite dish likely won’t have a modern technique or use an unusual ingredient. It’ll be a long-loved recipe, maybe cooked by a friend’s aunt, or a tried-and-true cake recipe from an ancestor that’s finally making its way to you. It’s that bit of nostalgia, memory, and care embedded in old recipes that are the secret ingredients to our future comfort foods. Ahead of his June 9th class, , I chatted with Bobby Hicks about the power of nostalgia, how hot Cheetos are the modern equivalent of gelatin molds, and vintage cookbooks.
What originally sparked your interest in vintage recipes?

I've always had a really strong connection to secondhand store life. I've always loved going to Goodwills and antique shops and things like this—digging through ephemera; old tools and books. During the COVID period of time, I was watching—I think it was the Great British Bake Off or something, and at one point I thought it'd be really fun to incorporate cooking with a fun, retro kind of 1950s video-style. Infomercials are teaching people how to cook, why don't I just make a couple of these for fun and just see what it's like?

Ultimately it was just this thing that I did as a joke, and it turned into something I really enjoyed. I realized that there was an entire community of people that also had a very similar interest, and it really inspired people in a weird way. I had so many people that would message me saying how it brought them peace and happiness because their mother would have made this dish, and she passed away—tales like that came almost daily. It actually was providing value in a very special way, and so I reflected upon this even more and I realized that it was the nostalgia behind it all.

There's so much power behind this element of nostalgia. It’s not so much the fact that it's a memory or an old cookbook; it's this direct pipeline that transports you to a core memory. It not only makes you feel good, but it makes you feel safe. I realized that I'm not really trying to recreate vintage recipes just for the sake of doing it. I'm trying to recreate nostalgia. Even though my account's called Retro Recipes Kitchen, and my cookbook is Retro Recipes, my brand itself is nostalgia.

What's your take on modern recipes and the relationship home cooks have with modern kitchen technology?

When I was writing the book, I read [many] vintage cookbooks, and this question would kind of irk me: Why do we have these really silly dishes that just don't make sense, you know? Like, why did somebody think it was a great idea to encase everything in gelatin?

I started to realize that looking at the older books, turn of the century, 1900s up until maybe the late 20s or so, a lot of the books actually had more cooking technique. They had more instruction, even if it wasn't exactly breaking down the rules of what you had to do, you understood how to do that [task]. Information was passed from your mother, your grandmother, down to your siblings, your children, et cetera, and this is how people learned how to cook.

But because of the scarcity of the Great Depression and wartime, everything was being sent abroad, and this lack of certain products—chocolate, coffee, particular meats, access to fresh vegetables or grains—there was this stagnation of information that was able to be passed down from family member to family member. All of a sudden, we are entering into the end of the Great Depression into World War II-ish kind of eras, where they're kind of trying to overcompensate because they don't have ingredients, so you get these things like the Wartime Cake and your butter-less cakes and things. These really creative recipes encourage people to work with what they've got.

What I find interesting is how different that is with today's modern era, where the opposite is true. We have so much information in abundance that it's almost equally as difficult for people to understand what they should be doing. There's an analysis paralysis that comes along with having an abundance of information, almost as detrimental as it is to have a scarcity or lack of ingredients.

We have more of an interest now than ever to learn how to cook, but people are doing a very similar thing that they did in the mid-century period—throwing things to see what's going to stick like, let's just try out what happens when you mix Fuego Cheetos with Mountain Dew, or whatever it might be. Weird, dumb experimental combinations that might actually work, and a lot of them don't, but they are still going to be passed on. Twenty or 50 years from now, people are going to look at this era and be like, “What were they thinking?”

At the end of the day, there is a reason for it. It's not just stupidity, it's this ingenuity mixed with curiosity with no direction—or, in our case today, too much direction.

What is it about retro recipes that appeals to all levels of cook—the professional chef population to the quirky home cook?

One thing to remind ourselves is that often less is more, and there's a reason for it. I think that we, as humans in general, are incapable of sitting still. We're constantly trying to figure out what the next frontier is going to look like. I think it's helpful to look back and see, not necessarily just at how simple a dish may have been, but why we still think about these dishes.

Chicken Kyiv is in my book, and pierogies. These are two things that I grew up with that are a core memory trigger to my mom. She wasn't the best cook, you know. She didn't really make anything from scratch, but everything was made with love; just making sure that we were cared for. People are constantly trying to see what the next new adventure will look like, but if you don't have something that roots yourself in the familiar and safe, then you lose your North Star. I think that it's important to remind ourselves of that.

You can play with fluid gels or practice your quenelles, and work on larding and barding, but at the end of the day, few things are going to be better than a quick hamburger helper. If we can teach ourselves to work from that nostalgia and harness the power behind it, that's when the best food is made.

Your cooking class with Milk Street is coming up, what excites you about the recipes you chose to share?

Personally, I just really love these options. The Cherry-Lime Ricky is so simple to make, so refreshing, and it's something a little nostalgic that we might not consider in an era where you have a long grocery aisle of beverages options. It's fun to remember that you can make your own drinks, and you can make them with very few ingredients. So if you like lightly sweet, effervescent beverages made from ingredients you understand and trust, then this is a wonderful thing that you could enjoy.

I chose the Applesauce Meatballs because they're absolutely delicious. It's an unusual combination of flavors, but it makes sense to me as a cook. When you're making a meat loaf, you are essentially making a panade—you're taking bread and milk or things like this that hydrate your meat—and you do this with meatballs as well. I'm actually using applesauce and corn flakes as those agents. They are meant to add some texture, but also a little bit of hydration. The applesauce is wonderful. It doesn't change the flavor, you're not eating a corn-flake-applesauce-flavored meatball, but you’re getting a meatball that is just so moist. They're very simple to put together, and you braise them in this really delicious tomato sauce that we will make. Then the sky's the limit—you could serve this on skewers, I absolutely adore them with some soft, cheesy polenta, and if you feel like being super classic: spaghetti and meatballs, man.

The Choco-Nut Toasties are based around simplicity—and not because I wanted something easy to write. I was just baffled with how much flavor could come from something so basic. These are so fun. It's a little French toast sandwich stuffed with Nutella. It's—it's drugs. Don't quote that.

If a person wanted to explore more vintage recipes, after Retro Recipes, of course, what three books would you recommend?

I definitely think one of my favorites is Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book, from 1958, I believe. It is perfect. Every recipe has been so thoroughly tested, I've never made a dish from that [book] that didn't work out—even if they were kind of dumb, like “take a can of this,” it still is good.

I'm going to stick with Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. That book is not only perfect, but essential. It might seem like a cop out, but it really is such a perfect book. Then, if I'm going to go for one last greatest hits that I'm excited about, Ruth Wakefield's Toll House Tried and True Recipes. It's really good and the recipes are fun. It's all baking, essentially, but it's a really good bakery book, especially for the time. This was really hard for me, because I could choose a lot more books, but those are three that I would suggest.

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Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

Allie Chantorn Reinmann is a Digital Staff Writer for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. She’s a Thai-American chef who earned her diploma for Pastry and Baking Arts at The Institute of Culinary Education and worked professionally for over a decade honing her craft in New York City at places like Balthazar, Bien Cuit, The Chocolate Room, Billy’s Bakery and Whole Foods. Allie took her know-how from the kitchen to the internet, writing about food full-time at Lifehacker for three years and starting her own YouTube channel, ThaiNYbites. You can find her whipping up baked goods for cafés around Brooklyn, building wedding cakes and trying her hand (feet?) at marathon running. She’s working on her debut cookbook and lives in Brooklyn, NY.