i2Culture lam Terrible and Beautiful and You Will All Tremble Before Me: How to Make Polish Cheesecake Jordan Tucker Guest Contributor ne of my dearest friends is defending her Master’s thesis. My friend is a great genius, and her thesis being approved (or whatever the terminology is, I am not a grad student, I am a now but a simple writer type who does not need to comprehend words) definitely merits some sort of free meal. A mutual friend and I decided to band together to create this surprise meal. We thought that doing so would not only create a delicious meal for our friend, it would also create a delicious meal for us, as well as the adoration and admiration of the ten people we usually hang out with. We pictured ourselves swanning into the silver-set dining room with aprons and trays laden full of food, and the tall handsome men who had suddenly become a part of our friend group (but who had also somehow been there all along, how did we not see it, oh Chad, oh Michael, you strong young tender yet somehow decisive bucks) falling to their knees with bouquets of flowers and promises of egalitarian decision making in our eventual co-partnerships (because marriage is about the patriarchal transfer of property rights, and most engagement rings are figuratively covered in the blood of African nations, I once saw a Leonardo DiCaprio movie). Anyways, our friend would feel rightfully adored, our friends would feel admiring and envious, and men with their lives in gear who wouldn’t be threatened by our success and who would know the secrets of the female anatomy would offer themselves to us. So we schemed: we texted our friend’s boyfriend, secret-like, as one does, when one is planning a secret surprise. It was frighteningly easy to obtain information from him without her knowing, which made me feel sort of retrospectively sorry for all of the people whose spouses are cheating on them in the age of the internet. Cheating used to be easy to detect: women were constantly wearing lipstick that they were rubbing on the collars of married men, and constantly calling the landlines of the men they were sleeping with, the better to be caught by shrewy wives. “I told you never to call here!” The husband, Cary Grant, would have shouted down the phone in front of his caring wife and simple children. Alas, these days women do their eyeliner and eyebrows, and scarcely even think to rub it on the black metal tshirt collars their married paramours are sporting, and the husbands don’t have offices to come home from, as they’re all unemployed and playing with their smartphones and myspaces. Even if they were caught, they’d probably convinced their reluctant wives into some sort of open relationship. If it takes more than five syllables to describe your relationship arrangement, it’s probably garbage, am I right? Make America Great Again! What happened to the middle class?! What happened to the white picket fence?! Thus I lamented the death of monogamy, with a clenched fist and distant gaze. But, alas, I am nothing if not stalwart and brave, and brushed aside my admirable feelings of sympathy and compassion for the cuckolded, so that I may continue my equally admirable task of creating food to nourish my friend, the beloved genius. Geniuses are often confusing, and the confusion is caused by them being too genius-y for their time. At least, that’s how I interpreted this recipe her boyfriend sent me, when | inquired as to her favourite food: “Perogies or Ahi Tuna. Ungava Gin, or Hendrick’s Gin with cucumber. Cheesecake, preferably Polish, definitely not the Superstore variety. Better off with Tiramisu if you're going to take that route.” My friend is a kind and wise genius, and her brain is better and smarter than yours and mine and everyone else’s combined into a giant pile and then mushed up and pushed out into a giant brain mold, as though it were being prepared for some weird jello brain recipe by a very unhappy housewife in the 1960s who is hopped up on a large dose of lithium. However, while our other friend and I appreciate what her big and wise brain do for us, and appreciate her mercy in not smiting us with her mind lasers for our insolence in daring to speak in her presence, we decided that her tastebuds might be a bit too avante-garde for us. That recipe, which her boyfriend surely meant as a recipe, seemed to completely disrespect the laws of cooking and good taste. We understood that our friend’s giant smart brain had long ago abandoned the need for such a mortal concept as good flavour. We could see, with our puny short-sighted eyes, the Dada-ist masterpiece she had created by enjoying a combination of foods that would surely make children and the elderly go blind. Her favourite recipe, we decided, was as if Beethoven had been a nihilist as well as deaf, and had endeavoured to make music that would make people understand the inevitable void by making them hear it, by making their ears bleed unto eternity. We decided that our friend would hopefully show us yet again her great and terrible mercy, and that we would create the ingredients of her recipe separately, and she could add them together in her plate in the order of her choosing, lest we do it wrong and she finally smite us with her eye-beams, the ones conveyed by the university to those who defend their thesis successfully. It was decided that I would make the cheesecake ingredient. Because I’m never happy going for a hike unless it’s up Mt. Everest, I decided I would make the cheese that is an ingredient of the cake as well. I thought to myself, it is simple farmer’s cheese. My grandparents are Swiss. They own many rabbits and goats. Also, besides being landlocked, having five official languages, lots of fine chocolatiers, and a terrifying amount of explosives beneath the bridges leading into the country, the Swiss are renowned for cheese stuff. It is their bread and butter, that they put on actual bread and butter. With chocolate too, sometimes. I have seen my grandfather do that, as a sandwich. It is horrifying. He is not a well man. Anyways, I am satisfied that I have enough ancestral European muscle memory to convey cheese-making skills upon me. When you don’t account for the thousands and thousands of years of ritual and memory and shared history specific to a place or country, every small farm where cows are in Europe is the same, essentially (I am not a historian. I am an idiot). Except Polish people seem to really use lots of cabbage. Other than that, exactly the same as Switzerland. Baking is made of wishes and dreams, and is not an exact science whatsoever [Martha Stewart edit: that is very wrong]. A little known secret of baking is that if you look fly enough, you can summon a tiny baking fairy. She appears in a cloud of flour, sparkles, and icing sugar, compliments your outfit, and then makes whatever you want for your fly-ass self. “Go on girl, go on get down,” she incants, as baked goods