Bobby Hicks Revives Vintage Recipes in New Cookbook

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Bobby Hicks’ new cookbook of vintage recipes had not even hit shelves publicly yet when he demonstrated a butterscotch bread pudding from his personal copy at an event. It’s when he noticed that the book had already earned some well-loved, dirty pages. And that’s just how he’d prefer it.

“I do not want you guys to buy this book and keep it on a coffee table and be precious about it,” he says of Retro Recipes: Vintage Dishes with a Modern Twist (Countryman Press). “This book is meant to be destroyed. You should be able to look back and refer to the ugliest pages, because those are gonna be the best.”

Hicks’ book is a natural extension of his popular Instagram account, @RetroRecipesKitchen. On both social media and within the pages of Retro Recipes, he offers modern takes on vintage dishes with history lessons that put the recipes into cultural context. Gathering this type of knowledge requires research, so his shelves stay loaded with old, used cookbooks from across eras that join a collection of modern-day messy recipes, too. Marked up pages help him discern which books make the cut for his collection.

“It used to be like, oh this is from the ’60s—cool. This is from the ’30s— amazing,” he says. “Now my collection is so huge I have to be more critical. I’m flipping through for pages that look like they’ve been used. My favorite are those little handwritten memories—distress marks. I actually think of them as stamps of approval, thumbs-up of love.”

Hicks’ Retro Recipes includes vichyssoise, Parker House rolls, Carpetbag steak, and personal favorites from his childhood like chicken Kiev and pierogies. Growing up, Hicks formed memories from frozen treats such as Mrs. T’s Pierogies. But the versions in the book have been lovingly re-created from scratch.

“The more people understand that a connection to the past could be directly set with a recipe—how immediately it can open up memory and nostalgia for you—it’s one of the things I’ve been really proud of with this book,” he says.

The Original Chocolate Chip Cookie

Bobby Hicks shares his version of Ruth Wakefield’s 1939 chocolate chip cookies from the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts. He also keeps a well-loved recipe card of chef Dominique Ansel’s cookie recipe in a drawer at his home.