I work in a career that is all about celebrating the ‘new’: the coolest new restaurant, the best young chef, the hottest food trend, the latest way to plate. The irony, of course, is that despite these contemporary happenings, the olden days have never been hipper with the cool kids. That’s why they love cooking over wood, pickling stuff, growing beards like Ned Kelly and riding bicycles without gears. Just like they did before the 1871 advent of the first geared bike.

In the olden days, eating out was fancy. The more egalitarian tone of post-revolutionary France meant that customers at the first restaurants of late-18th-century Paris craved the glamour once reserved for those now-guillotined aristocrats. They sought the opulence of velvet, huge gilded mirrors and glimmering chandeliers. It was not about knocking up $100 of marine ply, hanging long, red-flexed pendant light bulbs, ditching the tablecloths and getting away with it. Thankfully, our finest dining rooms, such as Rockpool Bar & Grill and Vue de Monde, understand the importance of an imposing dining room to match that imposing bill.

We live in an age where scientists suggest doing away with ingredients and simply plating up the individual chemical compounds that make them up. Herve This, the French scientist who brought us the term ‘molecular gastronomy’, now pedals this idea of note-by-note cooking, while others promise us edible, 3D-printed fruit or a thickshake called soylent that covers all your dietary needs so you no longer have to eat. Call me old-fashioned, but I like food that looks like food rather than a semi-fluid gel.

The lab-technology menu of foam, dusts and gels does seem to be dying out, so all praise be then to those great casual places serving real food like fried chicken, hearty salads and hunks of smoked meat that are killing it. And to those recipe books that encourage you to cook ‘real food’ at home.

After the scientific infatuation of the noughties, the culinary skills of the olden days are being rediscovered, from fermenting, pickling and preserving to curing and smoking. They’re in every hip restaurant as proof that the olden days were better. Baking is another granny-esque obsession making waves, but what’s wrong with using age-old flavours like raspberry, chocolate or vanilla? Does the world really need another batch of shock-factor macarons in flavours like mushroom and pumpkin seed? Surely there is more joy in a strawberry cheesecake than a Vegemite one!

In the olden days we ate rice pudding with raspberry jam to the sound of my father reading us the latest Dickens’ novel by the fire. In the ancient Arab world of the first rice puddings, rosewater and saffron would have been the most likely flavourings for the fruit compote it was served with. And yet that combo sounds like something from a trendy cookbook. Such is the way that we’ve embraced the best of the olden days.

For a truly timeless recipe, check out this Ancient Egyptian Rice Pudding here.

For more stories and recipes by Matt Preston be sure to check out his profile here.