This week’s recipe is something I’ve hitherto not cooked for a reason. I’m not keen. Well, I wasn’t. Not completely.
Oh, let me elucidate – I’m not keen on baked cheesecake. There, I said it. Dozens of you must now be saying “what’s he got against the humble cheesecake?” So allow me to explain further: I like ‘proper’ cheesecake. Old-fashioned, British non-cooked cheesecake. I can’t begin to count the amount of gloopy, supermarket-bought cherry and blackcurrant cheesecakes I ate growing up. Now, they were lovely; thick tart fruit, cool creamy filling, and the best bit beneath, all that buttery crunched-up digestive biscuit. Ah, memory! No, the one I have a problem with is the classic New York-style baked cheesecake. People go absolutely nuts about it, and I, like a continental European trying to fathom out a game of test cricket, am utterly nonplussed.
Almost every deli and bakery in the US will have its “famous” or “world’s best” baked cheesecake, and customers will swoon over its lightness or creamy texture. For creamy and light I read: bland.
Every single slice, and believe me, I’ve tried many (I don’t like to feel ‘beaten’ by any dish!) has been the equivalent of eating a vaguely vanilla-scented hollowfill pillow. Mouthful after mouthful of relentlessly same-y, almost-there flavours.
For me, anything made with that much dairy simply MUST have something as counterbalance. And that something, almost without fail, is FRUIT. At the very least, a good whack of fresh lemon would help proceedings; both zest and juice folded into the mixture would help alleviate the relentless stodge.
If you don’t want to sully the purity of the sacrosanct recipe, at least pop a sharp fruit compote alongside. Tart blackcurrants, gently simmered until popping in a little lemon juice and a hint of sugar. Perhaps some fresh, early-season strawberries, just rolled in a little lemon juice. Or the sharpness of maincrop rhubarb, now in full flourish, and crying out for the creamy, biscuitiness of such a dish.
This recipe, with a few of my own tweaks (largely to make the thing a bit less sweet), is based on one in the Peyton & Byrne book, British Baking, a great read with some terrific classic recipes.
I’ve been leafing through it over the last few weeks, noting down the recipes I’d like to try out, and this one was the page to which I kept returning. And, as luck would have it, in clearing out the freezer we found a big bag of raspberries, picked last year, and we decided to put them to good use, before I went and made yet another gallon of raspberry vinegar, which is sitting (translation: me = maturing, wife = taking up space) in the fridge at home.
It’s terrific stuff, especially drizzled over a Yorkshire Pudding (try it!) or with some sharp goat’s cheese, but I had already made enough for an army and was forbidden from making more, thankfully. So, the cheesecake recipe was sorted, and we had room in the freezer for the fish fingers at long last.
A freezer requisite, the fish finger. Makes an incredibly satisfying post-pub sandwich.
Back to the cheesecake. You could, of course, make a curd with any fruit you fancy; citrus fruit, berries, cherries and stonefruit make the best. Or indeed, a thick fruit purée would work just as well. Pineapple, perhaps, with a hefty slug of lime juice.
