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