855: Retro Recipes with Bobby Hicks & On Taste with Davide Risso and Gabriella Morini

The Splendid Table: Conversations & Recipes For Curious Cooks & Eaters

This episode of The Splendid Table explores two fascinating dimensions of food: retro cooking and the science of taste. Chef and culinary historian Bobby Hicks shares his passion

Key takeaways

• Post-World War II American cooking was shaped by industrial advancements like refrigeration and canned foods, leading to convenience culture but also lost culinary skills.
• Retro recipes reflect cultural memory and global experiences—like soldiers returning from Italy with vivid food memories that became distorted in home kitchens.

Main topics

• Retro cooking and mid-20th century American cuisine
• The evolution of food technology post-WWII

Notable quotes

'There's this fascinating tension between accessibility to tools and inventions that make everything more efficient, but simultaneously how that also took away a little bit of our understanding and ability to actually just cook.' – Bobby Hicks

Conclusion

This episode highlights how food is deeply intertwined with history, culture, and biology. From

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Support for this show comes from Feeding America. Great things are not built alone. They require the right pieces coming together for a purpose. And right now, as families face rising food costs, it's important to come together and end hunger, hand in hand. Farmers, advocates, donors, volunteers. When we connect our actions, we aren't just separating parts. We are a movement building a system that feeds millions. This Hunger Action Month assembly is required. You can give now, volunteer, or speak up at feedingamerica.org slash hungeractionmonth. Speaker 5 (0:38) Megan Rapinoe here. This week on Why Are You Like This, I am talking with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Pablo Torre about his New York City upbringing, striking fear into the hearts of sports teams and blazing his own trail in sports media. Pablo also flips the script on me and gets me to answer a very spicy question. Check out the latest episode of Why Are You Like This wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. Speaker 6 (1:07) I'm Francis Lam and this is The Splendid Table from APM. Speaker 6 (1:19) You know, as humans, we interact with our food on many different levels, from the biological to the cultural and the symbolic. On our show today, we'll talk with Davide Riso and Gabriela Morini, two Italian scientists who studied the mechanisms in our bodies that define taste and the surprising ways that our bodies use taste for, well, more than just taste. Speaker 6 (1:46) And then, on the other end of the spectrum, beyond what food does in our bodies, we'll ask questions about how some foods come in and out of style in our culture. Bobby Hicks is a bit of an old soul, despite the fact that he cooks on the internet for a living. But while in the midst of his career in restaurants, he started looking to the past for inspiration and found himself in the heavily gelatinized era of mid-20th century American cookery. But instead of knocking on these old dishes for being hopelessly passe, he started wondering how he could update them for modern palates while keeping their retro charm. He started a site and social media accounts called Retro Recipes Kitchen, and his cookbook is called Retro Recipes. So hey, Bobby, it's great to meet you. Speaker 8 (2:34) Thank you, Francis. Thank you so much for taking the time to actually chat with me. Speaker 6 (2:37) Oh, it's a pleasure. So you worked as a cook. and a bartender at renowned places. It seemed like you were really well on your way in your career in the sort of culinary world. And then you found this passion. How did you get into these old dishes and recipes that, frankly, may never be served in a restaurant ever again? Speaker 8 (3:01) Well, my hope is that actually after this cookbook comes out, we might actually start seeing a resurgence of some of these dishes. But, you know, I am after working at Milk and Honey, which is a really famous cocktail bar in New York City. Yeah. You know, that was kind of like this, this almost gateway into this, this idea of kind of understanding a little bit more about myself, you know, which is actually realizing that I had almost like this. superpower ability to kind of hyper fixate and memorize details that I think other people really struggled with. At Milk and Honey, you know, we didn't have a cocktail menu. We actually made everything customized based off of classic cocktails for other people based on the parameters that they were looking for. And so we had to know somewhere around two or 300 drinks, just in case you wanted to give somebody an option with, let's say, something spirit forward stirred with a good, you know, a rum or something, you know. And I was the psychopath that ended up knowing more like 800 to 1,000 different cocktails. Oh, my goodness. I really fell in love with the idea of studying the history and the dates and everything else because I always felt that there was a story to be told as well as the experience of just enjoying the product. And this is something that I was able to kind of bring into what I do with Retro Recipes Kitchen, which is basically like finding this fixation of understanding history and just... this passion for wanting to deep dive into something that I think a lot of people really don't think about and kind of showcasing some of these really unique nuances that came from that period of time, but also showcasing some of the parallels and similarities that we're actually experiencing today. Speaker 6 (4:34) Yeah. Okay. But the recipes you, you know, write about, redevelop, investigate are primarily from the 20th century. So they're retro. They're not ancient, right? I think that's part of the... the project. But it seems like a lot of your work does focus on the sort of post-World War II era. What interests you about this particular era? Speaker 8 (4:59) You know, I think that, I mean, aside from the fact that just they have really pretty colors and really cool cars and things like this, you know, there was something really fascinating about the post-World War II era because it was essentially, you know, I believe I was reading our third industrial revolution that the country has actually gone through. And it was this period of post-war where all of Speaker 1 (5:19) a Speaker 8 (5:19) sudden we had, you know, an increased amount of, you know, expenses that we could invest into the country with different advancements like... refrigeration or, you know, more like packaging and rapid production of things that would normally have taken longer. And I just found that there's this fascination between the correlation of having this accessibility to tools and inventions that actually make everything a lot more efficient for everybody, but then simultaneously how that also took away a little bit of our understanding and ability to actually just cook. And so there's this really fascinating kind of merger where people that, you know, had spent years and years kind of not necessarily cooking as much because there were, you know, women that were going into the workforce while the men were off, you know, serving in the war and stuff, coming back and all of a sudden still having to put food on the table. And there's this convenience culture of just being able to throw things from a can or maybe even frozen if you actually could afford one of those newfangled, you know, refrigeration devices, you know. I just find it's a really fascinating period of time because there's a huge just pinpoint on that timeline in history that you just don't really get to see very often. Speaker 6 (6:31) Yeah. I mean, actually, I love that you bring this up because I hadn't thought about the fact that. You know, I think this era gets kind of a bad rap. You know, it has the reputation of, you know, the mass introduction of convenience foods, the mass introduction, like sort of the beginnings of ultra processed food, the introduction of frozen dinners and canned foods. And like you said, sort of a sort of stripping away of the skills of cooking throughout the population. But at the same time, you know, you mentioned soldiers coming back from. These are folks who probably had never seen the world before, may have never seen anything outside of their own town. And so you have this whole generation of American, largely men, coming back and so in some ways more interested in food and more interested in the world of food at the same time. So, yeah, there's a really... Speaker 8 (7:26) It's kind of fascinating. Fascinating tension Speaker 6 (7:27) there. Yeah, it's fascinating because Speaker 8 (7:28) if you actually put yourself in the shoes of these people, imagine you're an American soldier and you're deployed to Italy, and you don't really know much about their history or anything like this, especially their cuisine. And all of a sudden, you get to experience just a simple pasta that's just done really, really well. And you come back home and you try to articulate to your wife or a family member and say, could you do me a favor? I had this dish where they basically took tomato soup. And they made miniature tiny little balls of meat. And then they threw in some kind of like a dumpling or a noodle or something like this. Can you make something like that for me? And with this almost game of like telephone that everybody is having, trying to translate these cultural experiences while they're traveling around the world. This is where we also get some of these fascinating bastardized recipes in all these mid-century retro cookbooks. And so these housewives or these family members are trying to kind of essentially... you know, manifest a fever dream idea that somebody had while they were also living abroad, you know, and serving during like some of the most terrifying times of their life. Speaker 6 (8:30) Yeah. Why were they being traumatized abroad? Yeah. Like the one positive memory. Speaker 8 (8:35) Yeah. So now obviously you're getting this world of just like bringing flavors in things that people have experienced that is globally appreciated today. But back then this was a new, new pioneering kind of period of time. So I just find it fascinating. Speaker 6 (8:49) Yeah. Okay. Let's get to some of these recipes. One of the hallmarks of this culinary era was just a tremendous amount of gelatin. Yes. Why were these gelatin-based dishes so popular? Speaker 8 (9:07) You know, I mean, there are a lot of really fun working theories and stuff. I mean, like, I think we should back up first and preface that, you know, aspics are, you know, as what we would affectionately refer to as an aspic, you know, I basically call it a soup that can stand up. You know, it's like they were really ubiquitous around that period of time, but they've been around for centuries. I mean, like some Speaker 6 (9:28) of Speaker 8 (9:28) the earliest recorded. You know, aspects come from like the 1300s. It's Speaker 6 (9:31) a very classic French thing. Speaker 8 (9:32) Exactly. Yeah. And so from my research, the things that I actually came to find was that they were especially prevalent during around the mid-century period of time. And they weren't necessarily meant to be something that you would actually eat. People do eat them, you know, especially in Eastern Europe and stuff like that is still a very common thing. But at the time, as it was being introduced, it was kind of more of a flex. It was indicative that you were. of a particular socioeconomic bracket that could afford something like these newfangled refrigeration devices that were coming out around that period of time. That you Speaker 6 (10:05) need to make this thing. Okay. Yeah. Speaker 8 (10:07) Because the one common thing that we all know is that to make a really good aspic, you have to have something that's loaded with collagen. You have to slowly cook it to denature the collagen to turn it into gelatin. And in order to get it to finally set, you need to have... cool temperature, some kind of form of refrigeration or just cold weather. And so if you wanted to entertain people during the summertime and show that you actually had like the best parties, you'd be able to actually make an aspic with, you know, whatever various ingredients you might have handy. And then all of a sudden put this out and everybody would see this and just freak out seeing, wow, they have a refrigerator. Speaker 6 (10:43) Yeah. That's so ignoble. But even still. You do have some aspic recipes in the book that actually do quite look quite delicious. The tomato aspic, I would welcome this jiggly addition to my table. Tell us about your tomato aspic. Speaker 8 (11:01) So in my studies, also the tomato aspic is one of the few safe options that I've actually come across that I actually enjoy as well. It's quite delicious. And it's really kind of simple. I mean, basically, we're just taking, you know, essentially nox or unflavored gelatin of your choice, whether it's powder or sheets. And you're mixing this with just tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce, some horseradish. And, you know, you can go a little further and deeper by adding other ingredients. I think, you know, the addition of like cucumbers and things like this just really build more flavor and more layers. But ultimately, it's one of these things where it's just incredibly clean. It's very refreshing, especially during the summertime. And it has like this really nice pinch of acid that's going into it from some lemon juice and a little bit from the Worcestershire sauce. So I mean, it's really a lovely, quote, salad. Speaker 6 (11:49) Yeah, yeah, that's a whole different issue. That's Speaker 8 (11:51) a Speaker 6 (11:51) different argument. Why every salad in 1955 had no vegetables whatsoever. Speaker 6 (11:57) Actually, speaking of salad, there was a recipe that you had mentioned to me as one of your personal favorites, the sunset salad. Speaker 8 (12:04) The sunset salad, I think, is just really fun. It still is in that same world of kind of being in like the jello verse of sorts, you know. And this one is just one that I really enjoy so much because even though I, in the book, even say I refuse to acknowledge anything that wiggles and jiggles as a salad. I think, you know, we do have to at least honor the idea of like the brigade system and the various different stations. And this would technically fall under the classic Garmagee section of salad. So that's where we'll land on this. But the sunset salad- Garmagee is like Speaker 6 (12:34) the cold kitchen, basically. Cold kitchen, yeah. Yeah, in the French tradition. Speaker 8 (12:38) And, you know, I think the thing I really like about the sunset salad is that it's just very light, refreshing. And it feels kind of like something that- Speaker 8 (12:48) It's almost like this perfect