NEW YORK — My father never missed a chance to eat cheesecake. He was a furniture salesman whose territory covered the New York metropolitan area, and whenever he called on stores near a bakery, he purchased a cheesecake. While my mother and brother avoided cheese in any form, he knew he could count on me to join him at the kitchen table after dinner to sample his latest discovery.
“I like the consistency of this one,” I said one night, feasting on a slice of creamy cake from a Brooklyn bakery. We felt the best cheesecakes came from places densely populated by Jews and Italians. “But the crust is wimpy,” my father said. “A good crust should be crunchy and thick.”
“The cake could be tarter,” I said. “It’s a bit bland.”
“But Reuben’s really makes the best cheesecake,” my father always concluded after we consumed several slices.
We didn’t wait for the late-spring celebration of Shavuot to partake in our favorite luxury. Reform Jews, we called Shavuot “the cheesecake holiday,” but we knew little else about it.
Shavuot, which begins Thursday at sundown, commemorates the giving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai
In Psalms 68:16-17, Mount Sinai is called by several names. One of them, mountain of peaks, Bar Gavnunim in Hebrew, shares the same root as gevinah, the word for cheese. Some historians speculate that after receiving the Ten Commandments, the ancient Israelites had been gone from their campsite for so long that their milk had soured and became cheese. It’s possible that they fasted while receiving the Ten Commandments and reached for milk upon returning.
Accordingly, Shavuot arose as a dairy holiday. For centuries people indulged in creamy confections for dessert, and cheesecake became the pastry of choice among Jews from Central and Eastern Europe.
Cream cheese was the ingredient that turned a dry cake into a touch of heaven. When farmers in upstate New York invented cream cheese to duplicate French Neufchatel cheese, they never expected enterprising Jewish delicatessen owners in Manhattan to buy the product in bulk for baking.
Arnold Reuben Jr., a descendant of immigrants from Germany, claimed that his family developed the first cream cheese cake recipe. At a time when other bakeries relied on cottage cheese, Reuben’s began baking cheesecakes with Breakstone’s cream cheese. In 1929, Reuben’s cheesecake won a Gold Medal at the World’s Fair.
Unaware of his destiny, a young go-getter named Leo Linderman left school at age 14 to apprentice in a Berlin delicatessen. In 1921, eight years after arriving in America, he opened Lindy’s.
In the 1930s, this marketing genius developed a cheesecake recipe inspired by Kraft’s Philadelphia Supreme Cheesecake and began selling a confection that competed with Reuben’s.
Those old enough to remember will tell you that Reuben’s cheesecake was simple and delicious, while Lindy’s cake, as showy as its inventor, was topped with strawberries in a syrupy gel. In addition, Lindy’s crust was doughy and not to my father’s liking.
Unfortunately, my father passed away by the time I married. But fate shined on me the day I met my husband and fell in love with his mother’s cheesecake.
In the ensuing decades, I’ve tried to conjure up the qualities of the quintessential New York cheesecake: a graham cracker crust, creamy texture, distinct lemon flavor and firm but light density. The recipe below delivers on all counts. Yet authentic as it is, nothing compares to those evenings when my father indulged me with wondrous cheesecakes from the bakeries of New York.