Cheesecake Madness - Food Can Evoke Powerful Memories

I bought a cookbook titled “Cheesecake Madness” at a flea market the other day.

When I asked the young woman why she was selling her cookbooks, she told me that they had belonged to her mother.

After her mother died, she cleaned out the house and put many of the items up for sale. I paid 50 cents for this sacred cookbook. As I left the table, I shook my head. I could not believe that anyone would sell their mother’s possessions, much less her cookbooks.

I brought the cookbook home and settled down with a cup of coffee and went through it page by page.

As soon as I opened the front cover, precisely clipped recipes started to tumble out of the book. In addition, there were many recipes that are glued or taped to the inside of the cover and at the end of various chapters.

I could tell that the recipes were not hastily fastened to the pages. The recipes are completely taped over providing a spillproof barrier so none of the recipes are lost during the messy baking process.

There is a sealed recipe for mocha cheesecake and two more for chocolate cheesecake.

I guess this woman, or someone in her family, was a “chocoholic” long before there was a term to describe our desire for something, anything chocolate.

I wonder if the woman who owned the cookbook ever made the Roquefort and peach cheesecake?

Did she, like myself, make a special cheesecake for dessert at Thanksgiving and Christmas? Maybe she served one of the lighter cheesecakes for ladies’ bridge club.

The book has a 1981 copyright so many of the ingredients would be perplexing to the current generation of Food Network groupies.

The Cointreau cheesecake recipe calls for zwieback. Another recipe calls for 1 pound of pot cheese, sieved of course.

There is a chapter titled, “Cheesecakes from around the World.” The ingredients for the Israeli cheesecake call for, among other things, 1 1/2 pounds of pot cheese, yogurt, honey and raisins.

Did she ever make this cheesecake for an exotic dinner party? Or did she focus on the more traditional recipes like New England blueberry cheesecake?

I guess it’s possible that she never made any of the recipes.

Maybe she collected them thinking (and hoping) in the back of her mind that she could conquer her fear of baking something as complicated as cheesecake.

I understand that the young woman who sold the book to me couldn’t realistically keep the things that piled up in her mother’s home. She had to discard some of them. Maybe she gave some things to charity and tried to make some money out of the “good stuff.”

In my mind, this cookbook is a strong emotional connection to her past.

Food evokes powerful memories. Memories I would be hard-pressed to erase.

I would not have chosen to sell “Cheesecake Madness.” I would have learned to live without the 50 cents.