July 28, 2025 • 29 mins
Nostalgia is such a big part of food trends. It shows up in dining, cooking, cookbooks, food writing, even food packaging. Think of that old-fashioned truck on the Peach Truck boxes!
Why is nostalgia such a big part of food trends, dining options, and even flash-popular things in North American cooking? Let's talk about the part of nostalgia in both our career and even in the books we've written.
We're Bruce Weinstein & Mark Scarbrough, authors of thirty-seven cookbooks. Our latest is COLD CANNING: small-batch preserving without the need of a steam or pressure canner. If you'd like to see that book, check out this link right here.
Here are the segments for this episode of COOKING WITH BRUCE & MARK:
[01:14] Our one-minute cooking tip: Put your small children and pets out of the kitchen when you cook.
[02:40] What's with so much nostalgia in food, dining, and cooking trends?
[26:38] What’s making us happy in food this week: steamed Chinese riblets!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Hey, I am Bruce Weinstein and this isthe Podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark.
And I'm Mark Scarborough, and togetherwith Bruce, my husband, we have
written 37 cookbooks, including thelatest cold canning, small batch, two
jar, three jar, canning without anyneed for a pressure or steam canner.
You make a small batch of what?
Help me here.
Oh, strawberry jam, red,current jelly, kimchi.
(00:24):
Mm-hmm.
Sauerkraut.
Fudge sauce, corn relish,bennel relish, pickle relish.
There's all kinds of chili crisps.
There's salsa matcha.
If you don't know about that,you need to know about them.
There's even dessert, sauces and liqueurs.
Anything you can put in a jar andstick in the fridge or the freezer.
For Well in the freezer indefinitely.
(00:44):
That's all part of the 425 recipes of thatbook called You can find a link to buy
it even in the player for this episode.
But otherwise, we're nottalking about that necessarily.
We're gonna talk about a one minutecooking tip, and then the big part
of this podcast is about nostalgia infood and cooking and why it's such.
Big part of food and cooking andthe culinary landscape, and then
(01:06):
we'll tell you what's makingus happy in food this week.
So let's get started.
Bruce (01:14):
Our one minute cooking tip, put your dogs and kids out of
the kitchen while you're cooking.
Basic, basic, basic.
In our cookbooks,
we refer to that as putfurry, well wishers and small
children out of the kitchen.
Our dog
has a habit of constantly coming over to the stove.
Mm-hmm.
When I'm cooking.
Mm-hmm.
Now, unfortunately, we haven't.
(01:35):
Open floor, plant house.
And unless I put him in the basement,there's no way to keep him out.
But you should try and keep them out.
Every time I open the oven, he'strying to stick his head in there.
It's
like not a good thing.
And this is, here's what's really wild,is we don't feed our dog any people food.
So the dog is there just becausethe dog knows, has figured it
(01:56):
out, or knows something, or therehave been splashes on the floor.
'cause he does tend to lick thefloor Incessently endlessly.
Yes.
Yeah, so it just because there aresplashes of grease, or this is out
on the floor anyway, to keep yourselfsafe, put your dogs and maybe your
cats and your little children outof the kitchen while you're cooking.
There's hot things goingon that can get burned.
You can fall backwards or trip, oh gosh.
Um, it's just best to put all that out ofthe kitchen when you're seriously cooking.
(02:19):
Okay.
Before we get to that nextpart of the podcast, lemme see.
It would be great if you couldsubscribe to this podcast.
If you could rate it, if you couldlike it, if you could even write
us a review, even nice podcasts.
That really helps thanks in theanalytics because we are otherwise
unsupported and this is the way thatyou can, in fact, support this podcast.
(02:40):
Okay, we're gonna talkall about nostalgia.
Hmm.
In cooking and food.
I wanna start this by asking you a question.
Okay.
Can you explain whatnostalgia actually is?
Oh, it's, that's really a hard question.
So what generally is understood asnostalgia is a sentimentalization
(03:01):
of the past that is.
Things that have happened in the pastare stripped of much of their larger
meaning, and they are sentimentalized.
That is, they are turned into afeeling of vibe, usually good.
That usually is the implicationof Sentimentalization and then.
(03:22):
Um, you know, anything that else issurrounding that is taken away and
you're left with this kind of goodvibe based on a past experience.
People have all kinds ofnostalgia for, um, childhood
places, childhood restaurants.
They have, uh, nostalgia ofcourse, and we're gonna talk about
this for childhood food and howthat impacts the food industry.
(03:46):
It's this idea that somehow whathappened in the past was better than now.
Simpler than now, and
probably better than it actually was back then too.
Oh, it is.
That's why I say
it's stripped of all its complications.
It's like
when somebody's spouse dies and then 20 years later they were
the sainted person in their life whenall they did was complain about them.
That's not
technically nostalgia because generallywe think of nostalgia as a cultural
(04:10):
trend rather than a personal trend.
I mean, yes, people can be nostalgic forsomething, but we generally think of that
as fitting into a larger cultural rubric.
Like, um, people are nostalgicfor the place they grew up.
That's because they believemost people are nostalgic for
the place that they grew up.
So we tend to think of it interms of more groups of people are
nostalgic and your nostalgia fitsin with a larger group of people.
(04:34):
Well, right now, the people that are really leading the
nostalgia craze in terms of foodare trend marketers and influencers,
right?
Yep.
They are.
Become big.
You probably know this already.
People, uh, have made careersout of cooking recipes from
the 1940s and the 1950s.
Uh, currently there are severalpeople making big careers in
(04:56):
the influencer space, you know,outta cooking from church cook.
Books in the forties and the fifties
Baking yesterday year.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And some of them are, uh,bringing back these old recipes
as, wow, aren't they great?
And some of them, there's one guy,particularly on a TikTok who cracks
me up, who is always making somethinghideously disgusting out of a church.
Cookbook often with gelatin.
(05:17):
Yes, often with gelatin.
And then he's, uh, basicallygagging as he eats it.
He just cracks me up.
He's just always dressed up in some, he'sa large man and usually dressed up in
some giant fairy costume or something.
So, uh, he makes me laugh out loud.
But yes, that, that is part of it.
Is this baking yester year,bringing back these really mm-hmm.
(05:37):
Old kind of, um, recipes.
Uh, you should know that right now, if.
If you're my age, you'llbe horrified by this.
But you should run right now that themarketers and influencers are particularly
focused for no nostalgia on the 1990sand early two thousands, but it's
still 1990.
(05:58):
In my head.
It's still 19.
That's, I'm still 30 years old.
I will always be 30 years old.
That's, that's really nice.
And so what they are bringing backand talking about and showing are
things that we lived on back then.
Things like Chicken Caesar.
Yeah, chicken Caesar
salad is, yeah.
Big right now.
Well, I always loved it.
I still love it.
I love to make it for dinner.
And one thing I've never made, butthat I see a lot on social media
(06:21):
for nostalgia or pizza rolls.
Yes.
Remember those?
Those pizza, pizza oven rollsare to Totino's pizza rolls.
Basically, they were burn bombs.
Yes.
They were.
You, they were.
Put those in your.
Toaster oven, and then you would thinkthey're cool and you bite them, and
then within 10 seconds the skin ispeeling off the roof of your mouth.
And I think the biggest trend rightnow, or the biggest, um, nostalgia
trend for 20 something influencers,people in their twenties is the vinetta.
(06:46):
And if you, that dessert, if you'remy age, you remember the vinetta
and the vinetta was so fancy.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, if you hadvinetta, you were upscale.
We just, we just ate.
Fricking Oreos.
But you know, meta
basically, if you don't know it was frozen, right?
It like a Sara pound cakein a metal container, right?
(07:08):
And it was a layered loaf cakewith cream, and it was Italian,
supposedly it was kind a
Swiss roll, kind of pseudo
Tyra masseuse, Swiss roll mash.
That you got frozen with
chocolate.
Right.
I'm surprised given thatI grew up in the south.
We didn't call it Vata, butum, 'cause of vina sausages.
But, um, anyway, yeah,this is, at least the
(07:31):
VTA doesn't have any jelly.
This is huge.
Yeah.
This is a huge trend that there areinfluencers making vitas, recreating them.
They're people, they weren't that good.
And I grew up with them.
I don't know.
It seemed like the absoluteheight of sophistication.
Remember the commercials?
They served them in coops.
They would cut the pieces.
Mm-hmm.
And put them in coops onthe table and oh my God.
(07:53):
It just seemed so Doris Day Fancy
and then you can drink with them the general foods, international coffees.
There you go.
Flavored.
There you go.
Sweetened powdered.
There we
go.
I think that one of the things thatwe've seen over our career is that,
uh, since the 1990s when we startedwriting cookbooks, late 1990s, 1999
was the first one, but since westarted writing then we have seen a
(08:16):
consistent nostalgic trend for baking.
Mm.
It has.
Absolutely consistent, and italways seems to come in a wave.
And the, you know, recent bakers,the people who are baking now, the
20 something influencers who arebaking, it's again, it's as if this
is coming out of nowhere and oh mygosh, we're making cakes again in pies.
But I have to say that in what, 25,30 years of doing this, we've seen
(08:41):
this baking wave Crest and crest.
Mm-hmm.
And Crest.
And Crest, it's a continualre invoking of a nostalgic
thing.
It's interesting becausethere are so many categories.
Of cooking that was done back whenwe were kids from casseroles, right.
To hot pots, to ground beef things.
Right.
And yes, they all have theirfew moments, but baking is the
(09:02):
one that continually comes back.
It does.
It continually comes back and,well, because it's so comfort, seems
comforting.
It, it always seems new, right?
When it comes back, it always seemslike it's just coming back into vogue
and you hear all these marketers andPR people talk about, oh, baking is
really coming into vogue and, and youthink if you like us and you've been
around the block a few times, you think.
Well, it's been in vogue like 20 times.
(09:23):
Mm-hmm.
In the last 30 years.
I, I think that there's, uh,there are trends right now.
You may know them for trad wife.
Explain what that is, please.
Traditional wife, a trad wife, atraditional wife, someone who stays
home, makes dinner, does the laundry,cleans the house, takes care of the
children, and there are all kindsof trad wife influencers online.
Now, I don't wanna make.
(09:44):
Fun of this.
Mm-hmm.
But I have to tell that's it's a
valid lifestyle choice.
I have to tell you that there aresome tra wife satire accounts.
Well, they're hysterical.
That are absolutely hysterical about,you know, my children wanted water this
morning, so I went out to our glacier andchipped off a piece and blah, blah, blah.
My child wanted to
thank you know, so I chopped down a tree and poked it.
(10:04):
And and made paper.
Yes.
I know there's these satire treadwife accounts, but T tra wife
is a big thing right now and itis really, truly, honestly, a
moving trend in the marketplace.
And tread wifes, I think, go backto this trend of a simpler time.
I don't wanna get into politics of this.
Mm-hmm.
And glorious stein.
And all that kind of stuff, but theygo back to allegedly a simpler time.
(10:26):
Now you and I are from this simpler time.
We are.
We're from the sixties and the seventies.
And we can say, I think unequivocallythat it was not a simpler time.
It
wasn't a simpler time.
We had a different experience though.
Your mother was a littlebit more of a trad wife.
My mother, no, my motherwas fully a trad wife.
She
got up and made you a hotbreakfast every morning.
(10:47):
Single morning until I went to college.
My mother got up 30 minutes beforeI got up and made a hot breakfast.
As soon as I was tall enough to reach the cabinets, my
mother's like, you're on your own.
You know where the cereal is.
As soon as I was tall enough to reachthe buttons on the washing machine,
my mother's like, do your own laundry.
And as I, so I didn'tkind of grow up with that.
As I've said repeatedly,my mother washed and.
(11:11):
Ironed the sheets twice a weekand sometimes three times a week.
Right.
No, we didn't have such a thing inour house and my mother didn't bake
either, so it was a whole this, whenI see this, there's no nostalgia for
me 'cause I didn't grow up with it.
But there is something nice about it.
'cause I'm like.
Hmm.
That kind of would've been nice in a way.
I mean, this has
been around forever when we were kids.
(11:32):
Uh, as I say, we grew up inthis alleged simpler time.
Let me tell you that waiting in line atgas stations for gasoline in your car for
an hour and a half during the gas crisis.
Hmm.
Uh, watching Nixon implode ontelevision, watching the Democratic at.
Convention explode in Chicago.
There was no simpler time back then.
No.
Nothing was simpler.
(11:53):
Watching our parents go throughmarital distress and difficulties.
It, there was nothingsimpler about a childhood.
No, but everybody thinks that 20 years before them was simpler.
No matter when it is.
If you talk to people in thefifties, they'll tell you
the thirties were simpler.
People in thirties, oh,nobody's gonna say the
thirties.
Simpler, I'm sorry.
Okay.
Alright.
Alright.
The people in the fortieswould say the twenties were
(12:14):
simpler and people in the, okay.
Maybe people in 19 hundredsor the 1880s were simpler.
I don't know.
Nostalgia, I don't know that I can saythat since, you know, uh, um, my other
part of my life is worrying about.
19th and 20th century cultureto teach it in classes.
But I can't say that nostalgia was asbig a movement in the 1880s as it is
(12:36):
now.
When, when electricity came into houses,didn't, people weren't in nostalgic
for time when there wasn't electricity?
No.
They were afraid
of electricity, butthey weren't nostalgic.
No one kept gas.
Flames on their wallsbecause they wanted them.
I've never heard of such a thing.
No.
In fact, they were afraid of electricity.
Uh, there was all kinds of fear.
Do you know this one we're way off topic?
(12:57):
When electricity gave me to homes,people were convinced that it leaked
out of the sockets into the room.
Well,
gas did, so why shouldn't electricity?
So electricity was leaking out of the sos.
There were all these things wherepeople allegedly burning up in their
houses, in their apartments 'cause theelectricity was leaking out of the sos.
This is not true.
That makes
sense that you would think that because gas did leak out and
(13:17):
kill you.
Right.
But again, I think that soldieris particularly a piece of 20th
century and now 21st centuryconsumer culture and it is invoked by
marketers who did not exist in 1880.
No.
And it is this way in which childhoodis seen as something better now.
Yes.
Did Charles Dickens write novelsabout orphans and children
because of his childhood?
(13:38):
Yes, he did, but it wasn't as nostalgic.
In fact, part of what Dickens wasdoing was rehearsing the grime grit and
crime that he grew up with as a littlechild in novels like Oliver Twists.
So, you know, despite musicalsabout Oliver that clean it all
up, Oliver Twist is a rather.
Dirty book.
(13:58):
It's, it's a rea it's a rather difficultstory full of hideous antisemitism.
So, um, I don't knowthat it's so nostalgic.
Okay, well I'm gonna get nostalgic today 'cause I'm going to the supermarket
later when we're done with all of thisrecording, and I am going to get you.
Some TV dinners.
Oh, some box mac and cheese.
Maybe I'll get some yodelif I could find them.
(14:20):
Oh,
no thank you.
No, thank you.
I think, I think that nostalgia isparticularly a problem for North
Americans, for Canadians and US citizens.
I do in terms of food, because I think,for example, the French are not necess.
Nostalgic about croissants.
Well, okay.
How can they be?
Croissants are part of theireveryday life and have been for
decades and decades and decades.
Well, you could say, if you wanna pushthis is, you can say that croissants for
(14:44):
them has become a, um, what do we say?
Petrified nostalgia.
That it's, it's set in placeand it can't be moved now.
Yeah.
Ossified
part of the culture, right?
It is.
But so much of French food is like that.
There are governmental agencies toregulate what baguettes must be like.
There are what croissants must be like.
There are what peachesmust be like, right?
(15:05):
How much sugar there are in plums,
but I would argue that.
Two, uh, there are all kinds of pastriesin Dutch culture, in Austrian culture,
in Czech culture, and those pastries arenot necessarily nostalgic because they
are the same generation to generation.
There's this kind of stability andit doesn't really take part of this
North American nostalgia thing tohearkening back to a simpler time.
(15:28):
I think it's part of adulthood.
You know, the loss of what you hadas a child, no matter what else.
And yes, there were gas lines, and yes,Nixon imploded and Spiro Agnew imploded.
And yes, the Democratic Conventionexploded and all that kind of
stuff happened when we were kids,but still in, nonetheless, we
were outside playing my world.
We were outside playing withthe hose in the backyard.
(15:49):
I don't know what you were doing,but we were riding our bikes
and playing with the hose, so.
It is this callback toum, uh, simpler timing.
Is there something that you hadas a kid that now formed some kind
of nostalgia for you in terms of
food?
Oh, it was penny candy.
On Penny Candy.
There was a little store, just the name.
What are you?
Victorian Penny Candy.
(16:10):
But you could go and it was basically bulkcandy, but you could buy it by the piece.
And the piece costs two or 3 cents.
We're talking.
Mary Jane's and Yes.
You know Little Taffies.
Yes.
And I would go to thislittle store called Docs.
Of course, it was called Docs.
And in the front counter there wereall these open boxes of bulk candy.
And I could go and buy pieces andI would hide them under my bed.
(16:32):
My box Spring had a zippered coverand I would hide them and I would eat
candy all night and my teeth brought itout by the time I was at high school.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
I'm noic.
That is a nostalgia.
That sounds like a nightmare.
I'm nostalgic for my teeth.
Oh, okay.
Well, I think mine, uh,would have to be Dairy Queen.
Oh.
Uh, would be soft serve ice creambecause when I was a kid, so I would
(16:54):
spend the summers with my grandparentsin Oklahoma that my great grandparents
had a farm and they all kind ofdecamp to this farm in the summers.
And I would spend the summers, a lotof the summers out there at that farm.
Okay.
Anyway, my, there were dairy queensaround, uh, Oklahoma City at the time
when we would come back into the city,and I should just say there were dairy
(17:14):
kings and dairy queens, and my grandmotherwould only let us go to Dairy Queen.
It was, I think it was her, um,Gloria Steinem thing, I guess.
And it, and we would alwaysget, of course, a cone, a sauce,
serve cone at Dairy Queen and.
I am very nostalgic for that.
And, uh, dipped
in red
or chocolate.
I didn't like them plain when I was a kid.
No, that'd be dipped.
(17:35):
Well, excuse me, it's my nostalgia.
Um, I like them plain as a kid and um,it is just a kind of piece of nostalgia.
And we have sent.
Stopped at Dairy Queens becausewe'll pass one somewhere and
I'll be like, oh, dairy Queen.
And I tell you, it's just not the same.
It tastes now weird to me.
It doesn't taste like it's real ice cream.
(17:57):
No.
It's your partiallyhydrogenated gum based beverage.
Yeah.
No it's not right.
It it.
Not what it was, but I still keep goingback to it, even though I know that
it's not the same as when I was a kid.
I still will pass a DairyQueen like we on vacation.
I'll be like, oh my gosh, wegotta stop at Dairy Queen.
Hope Springs Eternal.
Hope Springs eternal.
There are lots of ways that nostalgiahas shaped our food career, I think.
(18:19):
Right.
Well let's start just with Ice cream.
Right.
Ice Cream was the firstbook we ever wrote.
Right.
And ice cream really was somethingfor you that was nostalgic.
It was for me too.
We used to go to Carve and I do havebig nostalgia for that soft serve.
And then the big stews from our InstantPot Bible and Instant Pot books.
Those are the stews mygrandmother made all the time.
(18:40):
Well, yeah, I think, uh, just toblow this out just a little bit and
explain it a little bit, I think theice cream thing is right because when
we wrote the ultimate ice cream bookand the ultimate frozen dessert book,
the making, homemade making of icecream was just coming back on trend.
I think a lot of people had grown upwith it with churning the ice cream.
And now we suddenly had this advent ofthe home ice cream makers that had their
(19:04):
own chill unit and all that kind of stuff.
That's really interesting.
Or those ones you put in thefreezer, those canisters, and it was.
All kind of part of this trend backwards.
That's really interesting because your reaction to that was because
your grandparents turned ice cream.
So that reminded you of that.
And for me, I do.
When you take that homemade icecream outta the machine, the texture
(19:25):
reminded me of that soft serve weused to get as a kid that I loved.
We never made ice cream, but it it.
Pressed all those buttons ofthat ice cream I just got.
But I just say, I
don't think that's just for me.
I think that has to do withthe, the millions of ice cream
machines that were sold on QVC.
I think a lot of people were in my shoesthat they grew up with churned ice cream
at home and suddenly it was back in vogue.
(19:47):
And people wanted to know howto make ice cream at home.
And again, there's this,what were they called?
Do VAs or something?
Oh God,
that was the first one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Where you put the canister in thefreezer and then you hand cranked it.
Yes.
And you hand cranked it occasionally.
And then the machines startedcoming out with their.
Own compressors in them,which we got several of those
machines to test for the books.
And a big part of our earlycareer was the diet industry.
(20:09):
And that was happening justas the obesity epidemic was
striking across North America.
Big part of our career was writing for Weight Watchers.
Right.
And cooking light and eating well.
Right.
And we were able to jump onthose trends and just, you know.
Do really well in that category.
And I think it's really interesting.
I mean just, just as a thought experiment,I think it's really interesting to
think about thinness in the obesityepidemic as a nostalgic component.
(20:36):
And it's why people ran to diets.
Now, listen, they ran to diets becauseit's unhealthy to be very overweight.
It's unhealthy to.
Too much, I dunno, ice cream, for example.
Of course they, and, you know,cardiovascular disease was on the rise.
That's all the truth.
And yet I think there's alsothis component to it that
supposedly this is not true.
Uh, the fifties andsixties were thinner times.
(20:58):
Mm-hmm.
And so in the eighties andnineties, people were looking
back to these thinner times.
I mean, listen, all you have todo is look at Alfred Hitchcock
and know that they weren't thinnertimes, but it wasn't still.
But it's
easy to be nostalgic about a time when you might have been thinner.
Mm-hmm.
When you were, certainly, whenyou were younger and you've.
Felt better and you could wear mm-hmm.
Clothes.
Mm-hmm.
That you felt better.
Mm-hmm.
Wearing, it's very easy to do that.
It's all about recapturing youth, right?
(21:19):
Mm-hmm.
I mean, the diet industry was aboutrecapturing your twenties or even
your teens and getting back intothe dress you wore, getting back
into some outfit that you wore.
That was a huge part of our early career.
It was, I, I, I should say that westarted writing for weight watchers.com.
When Weight watchers.com
(21:40):
was this kind of, as we always say,the poor stepsister of the Weight
Watchers empire, and literally the firstmeeting we had was Weight watchers.com
was in an empty, openoffice space in Manhattan.
Do you remember this?
We went up to a floor of abuilding and it was like.
Empty except for like two desks, just kindof Jake leg set, somewhere in the middle
(22:07):
of the room of this giant open space.
And we were so dis wireshanging down from the ceiling.
And it was, it was, it was nothing.
It was, 'cause everybodythought online was nothing.
We were so disappointed that we weren't writing for the magazine.
Like, uh, we were, meanwhile we hadthat column online for 14 years.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, and
meanwhile, eventually the.com
took over everything and ranthe magazine essentially out of.
(22:29):
Business and ran most things outtabusiness in the Weight Watchers
world because of course the onlinesite became everything, but when we
first went there, it was nothing.
Yeah.
It was literally, nobody knew whatit was and, um, and how it would go.
I think that there's a way, even thatour current book, cold Canning is
part of a bit of nostalgia, don't you?
(22:51):
Well, yeah.
The idea of putting up things for thewinter of saving the fruit, saving
the vegetables, canning your own.
Yeah.
The nice thing in our book is youdon't have to deal with the hassle that
it was when our grandparents did it.
Nothing in our book is processed.
Nothing is put in asteam can or no boiled.
Yep.
No bottles are boiled to.
(23:11):
You're not boiling, you'renot processing, you're just.
Making some jam.
Putting it in a jar andputting it in the freezer.
Freezer.
And
I wanna say that I think, and thisis a very controversial sentence, and
I'm gonna really get flat for sayingthis, but I'm gonna say it, I think
people often think of nostalgia infood when it comes to the boomers.
People like me or the or the or, the.
As they call them geriatric Gen Xers.
(23:33):
Yeah.
We're
not boomers.
We're geriatric.
Yeah,
we're geriatric Gen Xers.
But, um, nonetheless, uh, they think aboutnostalgia when it comes to these people,
but I actually think that millennials areparticularly susceptible to nostalgia.
I think that that is thatsourdough craze with.
Millennials.
That whole chickens in the backyardin Brooklyn craze, they are
(23:54):
particularly driven towards somekind of rural, nostalgic pastor.
The Kin remember Kin Folk Magazine whereeverybody stood around and preached
skirts and fields and ate, I don'tknow, ice cream out of the container.
But that
makes sense 'cause they were the last generation before.
For the digital change.
They were, they cameover the digital change.
(24:14):
They, we came over it too, butthey were the last ones that
grew up with analog, anything.
Right.
They, they started out at fiveyears old analog, but then by the
time they were teenagers, theyhad did all changed to digital.
Yep.
But we came over it as adults that change.
Yep.
And that may be part of why itseems to me that millennials are.
All very suscept to it.
(24:34):
When we did, um, demographic researchfor cold canning, what we discovered
is that canning searches on Google,I know this is really weird to talk
about, but the canning searches onGoogle, things we do worry about.
Um, we're particularly big in people.
Um, age 30 to 45, which means you'retalking about essentially millennials.
(24:55):
At that age, and those are thebig people searching for canning
recipes, big demographic, searchingfor canning recipes online.
Every millennial out there listening buy a copy of our book.
Cold Canning.
You're like, if you know a millennial,buy a copy of cold canning for
the millennial in your life.
Yeah, it is.
True, but the canning thatwe're doing is really simple.
And one of the things that's interesting,I think about the nostalgia, particularly
(25:16):
as it affects millennials in food,is that many of them are nostalgic
for much more complicated things.
Mm.
Like sourdough starters and like, youknow, the appropriate Victorian sponge.
And it's really weird the theway that nostalgia can play out
because it can lead to an idea thatit used to be simpler than now.
(25:37):
It also can lead to this ideathat things were more complex
and so better, they were harder.
I think there's a, and so they were better.
There's a fine line betweengoing from nostalgia to fetish.
Well, there is, oh my gosh.
But it, I don't think it's a fine line.
I think it just shadesright off into fetish.
And you could argue that.
The French aren't nostalgic for croissantsthat the ants have become, uh, fetish.
(26:00):
Oh, absolutely.
For many French people.
Absolutely.
Um, but that's a wholedifferent discussion and one
not suitable for this podcast.
So, okay.
Before I get to the last part ofthis podcast, let me tell you that
of course we have a TikTok channelcooking with Bruce and Mark.
There's a YouTube channel, it'snot very active, called Cooking
with Free Saint Mark, but
there's a ton and
ton and ton of videosthere, there, there are.
Many videos out there, hundreds.
(26:22):
Um, and, uh, they're of coursea very active TikTok account.
And let me see that there's a Facebookgroup cooking with Bruce and Mark,
and this episode will be posted there.
You can tell us what you'renostalgic about with food.
Okay.
As is traditional, the lastsegment of this podcast, what.
It's making us happy in food this week,and I'm gonna start, okay, so what's
making me happy in food this week isBruce steamed Chinese ribblets slash That
(26:44):
was mine.
No, that's mine.
We can both have it.
But last night for dinner, uh,Bruce, Bruce spent the whole day out.
He was running around the state, literallyrunning around our state doing various
things and came back home and I couldn'tbelieve you wanted to cook dinner.
I kept saying, don'tyou wanna go out to eat?
And it's a long way.
It's a 20 minute drive even to a mid.
Place from where we live.
(27:05):
So he kept saying, no, I don'twanna get in the car again.
So he steamed Chinese ribs.
Okay.
So since this is your, so you explain,this is making me happy what it is.
These are Cantonese, ribs and black bean sauce.
So you must, if you cheated and put, uh,a hot Fresno on top of it, I, I put put
some little hot sliced red chilies onthem, which usually is not Cantonese.
So you have to have your ribscut into one to one and a half.
(27:29):
Inch sections.
So the each piece isjust, you know, bite size.
You can get them that way at an Asianmarket, or you can go to Costco,
which is where I found them already.
Cut that way.
Then you cut through each piece of bone,you separate them all, and then you
marinate them in oyster sauce, lightsoy, dark soy, little salt, MSG, a little
(27:51):
sugar, a little shing, cooking wine.
Mm-hmm.
MSG.
There it is.
I also put, um, a pinch ofground up, dried Chinese,
tangerine, peel, and star anus.
And a little corn starch, and you letthat marinade a bit and then you steam
them in a bowl in a steamer and about 30minutes and they are just spectacular.
(28:13):
Okay?
There is no way anyone woulddefine this as an easy recipe,
and I couldn't believe you did it.
I thought it was an easy recipe.
Okay.
It's not.
I'm, I'm here to just tell you.
Um, it's not, and we would be slapped downby both our editor and our copy editor
forever calling, anything like that easy.
So, no, it's not easy,but it was spectacular.
Delicious.
Oh my God.
I couldn't believe you put allthat effort into it after having
(28:35):
driven all over the state all day.
But you did.
That's what I went to for dinner.
It was really deliciousand we ate it with.
Deemed Chinese, what was it?
Uh, it was one
of those choice sum, or, yeah, it was a leafy green with a
long stem and it wasn't bok choy and
no,
it wasn't bok choy.
I don't know the name of all of
those Asian greens.
Yeah.
One of those Asian greens with littleyellow flowers and pieces of it.
(28:57):
Right.
So anyway, and rice, uh,yeah, it was really good.
That's what made me, I guess, bothof us happy in food this week.
Okay.
So that's the podcast for this week.
Thanks for being a part ofour audience, and thanks for
being with us on this podcast.
And let me add that in a world of AI now where you don't know
what's real and what's not, whenyou're listening and watching things
online, know that everything hereon Cook at Bruce and Mark is real.
(29:21):
Everything on our TikTok channel or thevideos on Instagram, everything is real.
We are not using ai.
So you know what you're getting?
You are getting Bruce and Mark when youwatch or listen to cooking with gru.
Hey, I am Bruce Weinstein and this isthe Podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark.
And I'm Mark Scarborough, and togetherwith Bruce, my husband, we have
written 37 cookbooks, including thelatest cold canning, small batch, two
jar, three jar, canning without anyneed for a pressure or steam canner.
You make a small batch of what?
Help me here.
Oh, strawberry jam, red,current jelly, kimchi.
(00:24):
Mm-hmm.
Sauerkraut.
Fudge sauce, corn relish,bennel relish, pickle relish.
There's all kinds of chili crisps.
There's salsa matcha.
If you don't know about that,you need to know about them.
There's even dessert, sauces and liqueurs.
Anything you can put in a jar andstick in the fridge or the freezer.
For Well in the freezer indefinitely.
(00:44):
That's all part of the 425 recipes of thatbook called You can find a link to buy
it even in the player for this episode.
But otherwise, we're nottalking about that necessarily.
We're gonna talk about a one minutecooking tip, and then the big part
of this podcast is about nostalgia infood and cooking and why it's such.
Big part of food and cooking andthe culinary landscape, and then
(01:06):
we'll tell you what's makingus happy in food this week.
So let's get started.
Bruce (01:14):
Our one minute cooking tip, put your dogs and kids out of
the kitchen while you're cooking.
Basic, basic, basic.
In our cookbooks,
we refer to that as putfurry, well wishers and small
children out of the kitchen.
Our dog
has a habit of constantly coming over to the stove.
Mm-hmm.
When I'm cooking.
Mm-hmm.
Now, unfortunately, we haven't.
(01:35):
Open floor, plant house.
And unless I put him in the basement,there's no way to keep him out.
But you should try and keep them out.
Every time I open the oven, he'strying to stick his head in there.
It's
like not a good thing.
And this is, here's what's really wild,is we don't feed our dog any people food.
So the dog is there just becausethe dog knows, has figured it
(01:56):
out, or knows something, or therehave been splashes on the floor.
'cause he does tend to lick thefloor Incessently endlessly.
Yes.
Yeah, so it just because there aresplashes of grease, or this is out
on the floor anyway, to keep yourselfsafe, put your dogs and maybe your
cats and your little children outof the kitchen while you're cooking.
There's hot things goingon that can get burned.
You can fall backwards or trip, oh gosh.
Um, it's just best to put all that out ofthe kitchen when you're seriously cooking.
(02:19):
Okay.
Before we get to that nextpart of the podcast, lemme see.
It would be great if you couldsubscribe to this podcast.
If you could rate it, if you couldlike it, if you could even write
us a review, even nice podcasts.
That really helps thanks in theanalytics because we are otherwise
unsupported and this is the way thatyou can, in fact, support this podcast.
(02:40):
Okay, we're gonna talkall about nostalgia.
Hmm.
In cooking and food.
I wanna start this by asking you a question.
Okay.
Can you explain whatnostalgia actually is?
Oh, it's, that's really a hard question.
So what generally is understood asnostalgia is a sentimentalization
(03:01):
of the past that is.
Things that have happened in the pastare stripped of much of their larger
meaning, and they are sentimentalized.
That is, they are turned into afeeling of vibe, usually good.
That usually is the implicationof Sentimentalization and then.
(03:22):
Um, you know, anything that else issurrounding that is taken away and
you're left with this kind of goodvibe based on a past experience.
People have all kinds ofnostalgia for, um, childhood
places, childhood restaurants.
They have, uh, nostalgia ofcourse, and we're gonna talk about
this for childhood food and howthat impacts the food industry.
(03:46):
It's this idea that somehow whathappened in the past was better than now.
Simpler than now, and
probably better than it actually was back then too.
Oh, it is.
That's why I say
it's stripped of all its complications.
It's like
when somebody's spouse dies and then 20 years later they were
the sainted person in their life whenall they did was complain about them.
That's not
technically nostalgia because generallywe think of nostalgia as a cultural
(04:10):
trend rather than a personal trend.
I mean, yes, people can be nostalgic forsomething, but we generally think of that
as fitting into a larger cultural rubric.
Like, um, people are nostalgicfor the place they grew up.
That's because they believemost people are nostalgic for
the place that they grew up.
So we tend to think of it interms of more groups of people are
nostalgic and your nostalgia fitsin with a larger group of people.
(04:34):
Well, right now, the people that are really leading the
nostalgia craze in terms of foodare trend marketers and influencers,
right?
Yep.
They are.
Become big.
You probably know this already.
People, uh, have made careersout of cooking recipes from
the 1940s and the 1950s.
Uh, currently there are severalpeople making big careers in
(04:56):
the influencer space, you know,outta cooking from church cook.
Books in the forties and the fifties
Baking yesterday year.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And some of them are, uh,bringing back these old recipes
as, wow, aren't they great?
And some of them, there's one guy,particularly on a TikTok who cracks
me up, who is always making somethinghideously disgusting out of a church.
Cookbook often with gelatin.
(05:17):
Yes, often with gelatin.
And then he's, uh, basicallygagging as he eats it.
He just cracks me up.
He's just always dressed up in some, he'sa large man and usually dressed up in
some giant fairy costume or something.
So, uh, he makes me laugh out loud.
But yes, that, that is part of it.
Is this baking yester year,bringing back these really mm-hmm.
(05:37):
Old kind of, um, recipes.
Uh, you should know that right now, if.
If you're my age, you'llbe horrified by this.
But you should run right now that themarketers and influencers are particularly
focused for no nostalgia on the 1990sand early two thousands, but it's
still 1990.
(05:58):
In my head.
It's still 19.
That's, I'm still 30 years old.
I will always be 30 years old.
That's, that's really nice.
And so what they are bringing backand talking about and showing are
things that we lived on back then.
Things like Chicken Caesar.
Yeah, chicken Caesar
salad is, yeah.
Big right now.
Well, I always loved it.
I still love it.
I love to make it for dinner.
And one thing I've never made, butthat I see a lot on social media
(06:21):
for nostalgia or pizza rolls.
Yes.
Remember those?
Those pizza, pizza oven rollsare to Totino's pizza rolls.
Basically, they were burn bombs.
Yes.
They were.
You, they were.
Put those in your.
Toaster oven, and then you would thinkthey're cool and you bite them, and
then within 10 seconds the skin ispeeling off the roof of your mouth.
And I think the biggest trend rightnow, or the biggest, um, nostalgia
trend for 20 something influencers,people in their twenties is the vinetta.
(06:46):
And if you, that dessert, if you'remy age, you remember the vinetta
and the vinetta was so fancy.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, if you hadvinetta, you were upscale.
We just, we just ate.
Fricking Oreos.
But you know, meta
basically, if you don't know it was frozen, right?
It like a Sara pound cakein a metal container, right?
(07:08):
And it was a layered loaf cakewith cream, and it was Italian,
supposedly it was kind a
Swiss roll, kind of pseudo
Tyra masseuse, Swiss roll mash.
That you got frozen with
chocolate.
Right.
I'm surprised given thatI grew up in the south.
We didn't call it Vata, butum, 'cause of vina sausages.
But, um, anyway, yeah,this is, at least the
(07:31):
VTA doesn't have any jelly.
This is huge.
Yeah.
This is a huge trend that there areinfluencers making vitas, recreating them.
They're people, they weren't that good.
And I grew up with them.
I don't know.
It seemed like the absoluteheight of sophistication.
Remember the commercials?
They served them in coops.
They would cut the pieces.
Mm-hmm.
And put them in coops onthe table and oh my God.
(07:53):
It just seemed so Doris Day Fancy
and then you can drink with them the general foods, international coffees.
There you go.
Flavored.
There you go.
Sweetened powdered.
There we
go.
I think that one of the things thatwe've seen over our career is that,
uh, since the 1990s when we startedwriting cookbooks, late 1990s, 1999
was the first one, but since westarted writing then we have seen a
(08:16):
consistent nostalgic trend for baking.
Mm.
It has.
Absolutely consistent, and italways seems to come in a wave.
And the, you know, recent bakers,the people who are baking now, the
20 something influencers who arebaking, it's again, it's as if this
is coming out of nowhere and oh mygosh, we're making cakes again in pies.
But I have to say that in what, 25,30 years of doing this, we've seen
(08:41):
this baking wave Crest and crest.
Mm-hmm.
And Crest.
And Crest, it's a continualre invoking of a nostalgic
thing.
It's interesting becausethere are so many categories.
Of cooking that was done back whenwe were kids from casseroles, right.
To hot pots, to ground beef things.
Right.
And yes, they all have theirfew moments, but baking is the
(09:02):
one that continually comes back.
It does.
It continually comes back and,well, because it's so comfort, seems
comforting.
It, it always seems new, right?
When it comes back, it always seemslike it's just coming back into vogue
and you hear all these marketers andPR people talk about, oh, baking is
really coming into vogue and, and youthink if you like us and you've been
around the block a few times, you think.
Well, it's been in vogue like 20 times.
(09:23):
Mm-hmm.
In the last 30 years.
I, I think that there's, uh,there are trends right now.
You may know them for trad wife.
Explain what that is, please.
Traditional wife, a trad wife, atraditional wife, someone who stays
home, makes dinner, does the laundry,cleans the house, takes care of the
children, and there are all kindsof trad wife influencers online.
Now, I don't wanna make.
(09:44):
Fun of this.
Mm-hmm.
But I have to tell that's it's a
valid lifestyle choice.
I have to tell you that there aresome tra wife satire accounts.
Well, they're hysterical.
That are absolutely hysterical about,you know, my children wanted water this
morning, so I went out to our glacier andchipped off a piece and blah, blah, blah.
My child wanted to
thank you know, so I chopped down a tree and poked it.
(10:04):
And and made paper.
Yes.
I know there's these satire treadwife accounts, but T tra wife
is a big thing right now and itis really, truly, honestly, a
moving trend in the marketplace.
And tread wifes, I think, go backto this trend of a simpler time.
I don't wanna get into politics of this.
Mm-hmm.
And glorious stein.
And all that kind of stuff, but theygo back to allegedly a simpler time.
(10:26):
Now you and I are from this simpler time.
We are.
We're from the sixties and the seventies.
And we can say, I think unequivocallythat it was not a simpler time.
It
wasn't a simpler time.
We had a different experience though.
Your mother was a littlebit more of a trad wife.
My mother, no, my motherwas fully a trad wife.
She
got up and made you a hotbreakfast every morning.
(10:47):
Single morning until I went to college.
My mother got up 30 minutes beforeI got up and made a hot breakfast.
As soon as I was tall enough to reach the cabinets, my
mother's like, you're on your own.
You know where the cereal is.
As soon as I was tall enough to reachthe buttons on the washing machine,
my mother's like, do your own laundry.
And as I, so I didn'tkind of grow up with that.
As I've said repeatedly,my mother washed and.
(11:11):
Ironed the sheets twice a weekand sometimes three times a week.
Right.
No, we didn't have such a thing inour house and my mother didn't bake
either, so it was a whole this, whenI see this, there's no nostalgia for
me 'cause I didn't grow up with it.
But there is something nice about it.
'cause I'm like.
Hmm.
That kind of would've been nice in a way.
I mean, this has
been around forever when we were kids.
(11:32):
Uh, as I say, we grew up inthis alleged simpler time.
Let me tell you that waiting in line atgas stations for gasoline in your car for
an hour and a half during the gas crisis.
Hmm.
Uh, watching Nixon implode ontelevision, watching the Democratic at.
Convention explode in Chicago.
There was no simpler time back then.
No.
Nothing was simpler.
(11:53):
Watching our parents go throughmarital distress and difficulties.
It, there was nothingsimpler about a childhood.
No, but everybody thinks that 20 years before them was simpler.
No matter when it is.
If you talk to people in thefifties, they'll tell you
the thirties were simpler.
People in thirties, oh,nobody's gonna say the
thirties.
Simpler, I'm sorry.
Okay.
Alright.
Alright.
The people in the fortieswould say the twenties were
(12:14):
simpler and people in the, okay.
Maybe people in 19 hundredsor the 1880s were simpler.
I don't know.
Nostalgia, I don't know that I can saythat since, you know, uh, um, my other
part of my life is worrying about.
19th and 20th century cultureto teach it in classes.
But I can't say that nostalgia was asbig a movement in the 1880s as it is
(12:36):
now.
When, when electricity came into houses,didn't, people weren't in nostalgic
for time when there wasn't electricity?
No.
They were afraid
of electricity, butthey weren't nostalgic.
No one kept gas.
Flames on their wallsbecause they wanted them.
I've never heard of such a thing.
No.
In fact, they were afraid of electricity.
Uh, there was all kinds of fear.
Do you know this one we're way off topic?
(12:57):
When electricity gave me to homes,people were convinced that it leaked
out of the sockets into the room.
Well,
gas did, so why shouldn't electricity?
So electricity was leaking out of the sos.
There were all these things wherepeople allegedly burning up in their
houses, in their apartments 'cause theelectricity was leaking out of the sos.
This is not true.
That makes
sense that you would think that because gas did leak out and
(13:17):
kill you.
Right.
But again, I think that soldieris particularly a piece of 20th
century and now 21st centuryconsumer culture and it is invoked by
marketers who did not exist in 1880.
No.
And it is this way in which childhoodis seen as something better now.
Yes.
Did Charles Dickens write novelsabout orphans and children
because of his childhood?
(13:38):
Yes, he did, but it wasn't as nostalgic.
In fact, part of what Dickens wasdoing was rehearsing the grime grit and
crime that he grew up with as a littlechild in novels like Oliver Twists.
So, you know, despite musicalsabout Oliver that clean it all
up, Oliver Twist is a rather.
Dirty book.
(13:58):
It's, it's a rea it's a rather difficultstory full of hideous antisemitism.
So, um, I don't knowthat it's so nostalgic.
Okay, well I'm gonna get nostalgic today 'cause I'm going to the supermarket
later when we're done with all of thisrecording, and I am going to get you.
Some TV dinners.
Oh, some box mac and cheese.
Maybe I'll get some yodelif I could find them.
(14:20):
Oh,
no thank you.
No, thank you.
I think, I think that nostalgia isparticularly a problem for North
Americans, for Canadians and US citizens.
I do in terms of food, because I think,for example, the French are not necess.
Nostalgic about croissants.
Well, okay.
How can they be?
Croissants are part of theireveryday life and have been for
decades and decades and decades.
Well, you could say, if you wanna pushthis is, you can say that croissants for
(14:44):
them has become a, um, what do we say?
Petrified nostalgia.
That it's, it's set in placeand it can't be moved now.
Yeah.
Ossified
part of the culture, right?
It is.
But so much of French food is like that.
There are governmental agencies toregulate what baguettes must be like.
There are what croissants must be like.
There are what peachesmust be like, right?
(15:05):
How much sugar there are in plums,
but I would argue that.
Two, uh, there are all kinds of pastriesin Dutch culture, in Austrian culture,
in Czech culture, and those pastries arenot necessarily nostalgic because they
are the same generation to generation.
There's this kind of stability andit doesn't really take part of this
North American nostalgia thing tohearkening back to a simpler time.
(15:28):
I think it's part of adulthood.
You know, the loss of what you hadas a child, no matter what else.
And yes, there were gas lines, and yes,Nixon imploded and Spiro Agnew imploded.
And yes, the Democratic Conventionexploded and all that kind of
stuff happened when we were kids,but still in, nonetheless, we
were outside playing my world.
We were outside playing withthe hose in the backyard.
(15:49):
I don't know what you were doing,but we were riding our bikes
and playing with the hose, so.
It is this callback toum, uh, simpler timing.
Is there something that you hadas a kid that now formed some kind
of nostalgia for you in terms of
food?
Oh, it was penny candy.
On Penny Candy.
There was a little store, just the name.
What are you?
Victorian Penny Candy.
(16:10):
But you could go and it was basically bulkcandy, but you could buy it by the piece.
And the piece costs two or 3 cents.
We're talking.
Mary Jane's and Yes.
You know Little Taffies.
Yes.
And I would go to thislittle store called Docs.
Of course, it was called Docs.
And in the front counter there wereall these open boxes of bulk candy.
And I could go and buy pieces andI would hide them under my bed.
(16:32):
My box Spring had a zippered coverand I would hide them and I would eat
candy all night and my teeth brought itout by the time I was at high school.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
I'm noic.
That is a nostalgia.
That sounds like a nightmare.
I'm nostalgic for my teeth.
Oh, okay.
Well, I think mine, uh,would have to be Dairy Queen.
Oh.
Uh, would be soft serve ice creambecause when I was a kid, so I would
(16:54):
spend the summers with my grandparentsin Oklahoma that my great grandparents
had a farm and they all kind ofdecamp to this farm in the summers.
And I would spend the summers, a lotof the summers out there at that farm.
Okay.
Anyway, my, there were dairy queensaround, uh, Oklahoma City at the time
when we would come back into the city,and I should just say there were dairy
(17:14):
kings and dairy queens, and my grandmotherwould only let us go to Dairy Queen.
It was, I think it was her, um,Gloria Steinem thing, I guess.
And it, and we would alwaysget, of course, a cone, a sauce,
serve cone at Dairy Queen and.
I am very nostalgic for that.
And, uh, dipped
in red
or chocolate.
I didn't like them plain when I was a kid.
No, that'd be dipped.
(17:35):
Well, excuse me, it's my nostalgia.
Um, I like them plain as a kid and um,it is just a kind of piece of nostalgia.
And we have sent.
Stopped at Dairy Queens becausewe'll pass one somewhere and
I'll be like, oh, dairy Queen.
And I tell you, it's just not the same.
It tastes now weird to me.
It doesn't taste like it's real ice cream.
(17:57):
No.
It's your partiallyhydrogenated gum based beverage.
Yeah.
No it's not right.
It it.
Not what it was, but I still keep goingback to it, even though I know that
it's not the same as when I was a kid.
I still will pass a DairyQueen like we on vacation.
I'll be like, oh my gosh, wegotta stop at Dairy Queen.
Hope Springs Eternal.
Hope Springs eternal.
There are lots of ways that nostalgiahas shaped our food career, I think.
(18:19):
Right.
Well let's start just with Ice cream.
Right.
Ice Cream was the firstbook we ever wrote.
Right.
And ice cream really was somethingfor you that was nostalgic.
It was for me too.
We used to go to Carve and I do havebig nostalgia for that soft serve.
And then the big stews from our InstantPot Bible and Instant Pot books.
Those are the stews mygrandmother made all the time.
(18:40):
Well, yeah, I think, uh, just toblow this out just a little bit and
explain it a little bit, I think theice cream thing is right because when
we wrote the ultimate ice cream bookand the ultimate frozen dessert book,
the making, homemade making of icecream was just coming back on trend.
I think a lot of people had grown upwith it with churning the ice cream.
And now we suddenly had this advent ofthe home ice cream makers that had their
(19:04):
own chill unit and all that kind of stuff.
That's really interesting.
Or those ones you put in thefreezer, those canisters, and it was.
All kind of part of this trend backwards.
That's really interesting because your reaction to that was because
your grandparents turned ice cream.
So that reminded you of that.
And for me, I do.
When you take that homemade icecream outta the machine, the texture
(19:25):
reminded me of that soft serve weused to get as a kid that I loved.
We never made ice cream, but it it.
Pressed all those buttons ofthat ice cream I just got.
But I just say, I
don't think that's just for me.
I think that has to do withthe, the millions of ice cream
machines that were sold on QVC.
I think a lot of people were in my shoesthat they grew up with churned ice cream
at home and suddenly it was back in vogue.
(19:47):
And people wanted to know howto make ice cream at home.
And again, there's this,what were they called?
Do VAs or something?
Oh God,
that was the first one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Where you put the canister in thefreezer and then you hand cranked it.
Yes.
And you hand cranked it occasionally.
And then the machines startedcoming out with their.
Own compressors in them,which we got several of those
machines to test for the books.
And a big part of our earlycareer was the diet industry.
(20:09):
And that was happening justas the obesity epidemic was
striking across North America.
Big part of our career was writing for Weight Watchers.
Right.
And cooking light and eating well.
Right.
And we were able to jump onthose trends and just, you know.
Do really well in that category.
And I think it's really interesting.
I mean just, just as a thought experiment,I think it's really interesting to
think about thinness in the obesityepidemic as a nostalgic component.
(20:36):
And it's why people ran to diets.
Now, listen, they ran to diets becauseit's unhealthy to be very overweight.
It's unhealthy to.
Too much, I dunno, ice cream, for example.
Of course they, and, you know,cardiovascular disease was on the rise.
That's all the truth.
And yet I think there's alsothis component to it that
supposedly this is not true.
Uh, the fifties andsixties were thinner times.
(20:58):
Mm-hmm.
And so in the eighties andnineties, people were looking
back to these thinner times.
I mean, listen, all you have todo is look at Alfred Hitchcock
and know that they weren't thinnertimes, but it wasn't still.
But it's
easy to be nostalgic about a time when you might have been thinner.
Mm-hmm.
When you were, certainly, whenyou were younger and you've.
Felt better and you could wear mm-hmm.
Clothes.
Mm-hmm.
That you felt better.
Mm-hmm.
Wearing, it's very easy to do that.
It's all about recapturing youth, right?
(21:19):
Mm-hmm.
I mean, the diet industry was aboutrecapturing your twenties or even
your teens and getting back intothe dress you wore, getting back
into some outfit that you wore.
That was a huge part of our early career.
It was, I, I, I should say that westarted writing for weight watchers.com.
When Weight watchers.com
(21:40):
was this kind of, as we always say,the poor stepsister of the Weight
Watchers empire, and literally the firstmeeting we had was Weight watchers.com
was in an empty, openoffice space in Manhattan.
Do you remember this?
We went up to a floor of abuilding and it was like.
Empty except for like two desks, just kindof Jake leg set, somewhere in the middle
(22:07):
of the room of this giant open space.
And we were so dis wireshanging down from the ceiling.
And it was, it was, it was nothing.
It was, 'cause everybodythought online was nothing.
We were so disappointed that we weren't writing for the magazine.
Like, uh, we were, meanwhile we hadthat column online for 14 years.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, and
meanwhile, eventually the.com
took over everything and ranthe magazine essentially out of.
(22:29):
Business and ran most things outtabusiness in the Weight Watchers
world because of course the onlinesite became everything, but when we
first went there, it was nothing.
Yeah.
It was literally, nobody knew whatit was and, um, and how it would go.
I think that there's a way, even thatour current book, cold Canning is
part of a bit of nostalgia, don't you?
(22:51):
Well, yeah.
The idea of putting up things for thewinter of saving the fruit, saving
the vegetables, canning your own.
Yeah.
The nice thing in our book is youdon't have to deal with the hassle that
it was when our grandparents did it.
Nothing in our book is processed.
Nothing is put in asteam can or no boiled.
Yep.
No bottles are boiled to.
(23:11):
You're not boiling, you'renot processing, you're just.
Making some jam.
Putting it in a jar andputting it in the freezer.
Freezer.
And
I wanna say that I think, and thisis a very controversial sentence, and
I'm gonna really get flat for sayingthis, but I'm gonna say it, I think
people often think of nostalgia infood when it comes to the boomers.
People like me or the or the or, the.
As they call them geriatric Gen Xers.
(23:33):
Yeah.
We're
not boomers.
We're geriatric.
Yeah,
we're geriatric Gen Xers.
But, um, nonetheless, uh, they think aboutnostalgia when it comes to these people,
but I actually think that millennials areparticularly susceptible to nostalgia.
I think that that is thatsourdough craze with.
Millennials.
That whole chickens in the backyardin Brooklyn craze, they are
(23:54):
particularly driven towards somekind of rural, nostalgic pastor.
The Kin remember Kin Folk Magazine whereeverybody stood around and preached
skirts and fields and ate, I don'tknow, ice cream out of the container.
But that
makes sense 'cause they were the last generation before.
For the digital change.
They were, they cameover the digital change.
(24:14):
They, we came over it too, butthey were the last ones that
grew up with analog, anything.
Right.
They, they started out at fiveyears old analog, but then by the
time they were teenagers, theyhad did all changed to digital.
Yep.
But we came over it as adults that change.
Yep.
And that may be part of why itseems to me that millennials are.
All very suscept to it.
(24:34):
When we did, um, demographic researchfor cold canning, what we discovered
is that canning searches on Google,I know this is really weird to talk
about, but the canning searches onGoogle, things we do worry about.
Um, we're particularly big in people.
Um, age 30 to 45, which means you'retalking about essentially millennials.
(24:55):
At that age, and those are thebig people searching for canning
recipes, big demographic, searchingfor canning recipes online.
Every millennial out there listening buy a copy of our book.
Cold Canning.
You're like, if you know a millennial,buy a copy of cold canning for
the millennial in your life.
Yeah, it is.
True, but the canning thatwe're doing is really simple.
And one of the things that's interesting,I think about the nostalgia, particularly
(25:16):
as it affects millennials in food,is that many of them are nostalgic
for much more complicated things.
Mm.
Like sourdough starters and like, youknow, the appropriate Victorian sponge.
And it's really weird the theway that nostalgia can play out
because it can lead to an idea thatit used to be simpler than now.
(25:37):
It also can lead to this ideathat things were more complex
and so better, they were harder.
I think there's a, and so they were better.
There's a fine line betweengoing from nostalgia to fetish.
Well, there is, oh my gosh.
But it, I don't think it's a fine line.
I think it just shadesright off into fetish.
And you could argue that.
The French aren't nostalgic for croissantsthat the ants have become, uh, fetish.
(26:00):
Oh, absolutely.
For many French people.
Absolutely.
Um, but that's a wholedifferent discussion and one
not suitable for this podcast.
So, okay.
Before I get to the last part ofthis podcast, let me tell you that
of course we have a TikTok channelcooking with Bruce and Mark.
There's a YouTube channel, it'snot very active, called Cooking
with Free Saint Mark, but
there's a ton and
ton and ton of videosthere, there, there are.
Many videos out there, hundreds.
(26:22):
Um, and, uh, they're of coursea very active TikTok account.
And let me see that there's a Facebookgroup cooking with Bruce and Mark,
and this episode will be posted there.
You can tell us what you'renostalgic about with food.
Okay.
As is traditional, the lastsegment of this podcast, what.
It's making us happy in food this week,and I'm gonna start, okay, so what's
making me happy in food this week isBruce steamed Chinese ribblets slash That
(26:44):
was mine.
No, that's mine.
We can both have it.
But last night for dinner, uh,Bruce, Bruce spent the whole day out.
He was running around the state, literallyrunning around our state doing various
things and came back home and I couldn'tbelieve you wanted to cook dinner.
I kept saying, don'tyou wanna go out to eat?
And it's a long way.
It's a 20 minute drive even to a mid.
Place from where we live.
(27:05):
So he kept saying, no, I don'twanna get in the car again.
So he steamed Chinese ribs.
Okay.
So since this is your, so you explain,this is making me happy what it is.
These are Cantonese, ribs and black bean sauce.
So you must, if you cheated and put, uh,a hot Fresno on top of it, I, I put put
some little hot sliced red chilies onthem, which usually is not Cantonese.
So you have to have your ribscut into one to one and a half.
(27:29):
Inch sections.
So the each piece isjust, you know, bite size.
You can get them that way at an Asianmarket, or you can go to Costco,
which is where I found them already.
Cut that way.
Then you cut through each piece of bone,you separate them all, and then you
marinate them in oyster sauce, lightsoy, dark soy, little salt, MSG, a little
(27:51):
sugar, a little shing, cooking wine.
Mm-hmm.
MSG.
There it is.
I also put, um, a pinch ofground up, dried Chinese,
tangerine, peel, and star anus.
And a little corn starch, and you letthat marinade a bit and then you steam
them in a bowl in a steamer and about 30minutes and they are just spectacular.
(28:13):
Okay?
There is no way anyone woulddefine this as an easy recipe,
and I couldn't believe you did it.
I thought it was an easy recipe.
Okay.
It's not.
I'm, I'm here to just tell you.
Um, it's not, and we would be slapped downby both our editor and our copy editor
forever calling, anything like that easy.
So, no, it's not easy,but it was spectacular.
Delicious.
Oh my God.
I couldn't believe you put allthat effort into it after having
(28:35):
driven all over the state all day.
But you did.
That's what I went to for dinner.
It was really deliciousand we ate it with.
Deemed Chinese, what was it?
Uh, it was one
of those choice sum, or, yeah, it was a leafy green with a
long stem and it wasn't bok choy and
no,
it wasn't bok choy.
I don't know the name of all of
those Asian greens.
Yeah.
One of those Asian greens with littleyellow flowers and pieces of it.
(28:57):
Right.
So anyway, and rice, uh,yeah, it was really good.
That's what made me, I guess, bothof us happy in food this week.
Okay.
So that's the podcast for this week.
Thanks for being a part ofour audience, and thanks for
being with us on this podcast.
And let me add that in a world of AI now where you don't know
what's real and what's not, whenyou're listening and watching things
online, know that everything hereon Cook at Bruce and Mark is real.
(29:21):
Everything on our TikTok channel or thevideos on Instagram, everything is real.
We are not using ai.
So you know what you're getting?
You are getting Bruce and Mark when youwatch or listen to cooking with gru.
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