A Tale of Three Cheesecakes

I know it is criminal form to follow up a very sour post on food blogs and cooking with a recipe post. But don’t let the food define me, please.

For me, the revelations have come and gone. I have experienced the rush of power, magic and self-confidence when you turn that perfect tart out onto a plate, or serve up that brilliant mutton korma, or your first-ever lasagne holds form (and flavour) or even your everyday tea cake is always as perfect and crumby and buttery every time you bake it, because you are just that good. I have celebrated myself plenty of times, and I am over it. Now for the sharing.

 The horrendously expensive cheesecake @ Latitude, Khan Market.

Cheese and cake. Part of the thrill for first-time cheesecake eaters must be the combination of two such odd bedfellows in one dessert. Are there palates that dislike cheesecake because of the sour-and-sweet flavour? Possibly. But everyone in India seems to adore cheesecake. Funnily, I don’t remember it being a big deal in my childhood although I was otherwise quite the connoisseur of sweet things. Was this because cheesecake just wasn’t so popular in Dubai, or was it an 80s thing? I’m pretty sure I only woke up to the wonders of cheesecake in my college years, discovering the revelation that was the Key Lime Cheesecake at Gallopin’ Gooseberry on Greams Road, Chennai. Thereafter I convinced Amma to add a cheesecake or two to her repertoire of delights as well. These days in Delhi it seems like every restaurant or café has a hot-selling cheesecake on its dessert menu, vying against the ubiquitous chocolate item. And while it used to be the case even up to 5 or 6years ago that some café cheesecakes were just a pile of gelatinous cream with blueberry jam on top, things have really changed for the better now. Everywhere you go, there is a nice, dense cheesy slice of heaven to be had, and sometimes there are even varieties on the same menu. That leads me to believe everyone is just obsessed with cheesecake these days, period. 

The somewhat more affordable Blueberry cheesecake @ Big Chill.

In my brief time as Kitchen Goddess, I have had modest success with the cheesecake because it’s not really a very difficult thing to make. The processing is easy; it’s the ingredients that are hard to come by. Unless you live near a good department store or Khan Market, it’s a pain to have to lug little tubs of cheese home on the metro. And as with so many other things, when it comes to cheesecake, I'm a purist. I'm not a big fan of Americanized innovations with Oreo cookies and such like. For these reasons and because at first I didn't own an oven, I hunted out this genius Tarla Dalal recipe for a No-Bake Cheesecake that uses only the most basic ingredients and doesn't have to be cooked. It was the first cheesecake I made, and though it is a bit skinny, like the Indian vegetarians it must be aimed at, it is nonetheless quite satisfying. Here’s the thing: you can make the cream cheese in this recipe from scratch, as per the original, but it will not remotely be the cream cheese that we know from tubs, and will be a bit lumpy and milky in texture. In short, it will be loose cottage cheese and not cream cheese per se. This does not make it a bad cheesecake, but a very homespun one. To smoothen it out a bit, I tried replacing the homemade cheese with store-bought Britannia cream cheese in the recipe. That made the most delicious flavour and texture, but the damn thing wouldn’t set. It remained, obstinately, cheese on cake and not cheesecake. So I realized this replacement, if made, must be done WITH a little help from gelatin to make it set. Here it is.

Tarla Dalal’s No-Bake Lemon Cheesecake

10 digestive biscuits, crushed

2 tsp butter, melted

1 cup Homemade cream cheese* or Store-bought cream cheese

½ tbsp gelatin dissolved in 3 tbsp cold water (if using store-bought cheese)

½ cup yoghurt

2 ½ tbsp sugar

1 tsp lemon juice

1 tsp lemon zest

A few drops lemon essence (optional)

Lemon/Orange marmalade (optional for topping)

Combine butter & biscuits to make a crumby mix and line the bottom of a 4”/100mm diameter loose-bottomed cake/pie tin, and refrigerate till set. Blend cream cheese and add warm milk if lumpy. Combine with remaining ingredients in a bowl and whisk till smooth. Pour mixture over the set crust and refrigerate till set (1 hour). Melt marmalade with a tablespoon of water and spread on top of set cheesecake, and refrigerate again till cooled.

*Homemade cream cheese:

1 ltr milk
1 tsp citric acid or ½ tbsp lime juice
1/2 cup warm water

Put the milk to boil in a thick bottomed pan. When it comes to a boil, remove from the flame and keep aside for a few minutes. In another bowl, mix the citric acid crystals/lime juice with the warm water. Pour a little of this mixture into the hot milk and allow it to stand for about 5 minutes till the milk curdles on its own. Stir gently if required. Add some more citric acid liquid if required. Strain this mixture using a muslin cloth, leaving some of the whey in the curdled mixture. Blend the drained milk solids in a food processor till thick and creamy. If the drained whey is milky, boil it once more and strain the separated milk solids.

Once I became the greedy owner of an oven and a handheld mixer, the sky was the limit on the cheesecakes I could make. Mr. Ji does not like anything with chocolate in it so there is a constant demand for fruit or otherwise-flavoured desserts in this house. Thus far, I have made three different baked cheesecakes at home and I can’t tell which is better than the other. The latter two are my friends and family’s favourites because they are very rich, flavorful and textured but this is because they include sour cream and mascarpone, which though delightful are difficult cheeses to obtain. I have to go to Khan or Defence Colony for them and only one or two Indian companies manufacture them cheaply. Furthermore, in terms of difficulty levels, they are for the more experienced cook. But the first recipe, from my favorite old aunty, Rachel Allen, is very simple and uses only cream cheese, which Britannia has made readily available now. In case you’re wondering, cream cheese is not the same thing as a plain cheese spread that you’d use on bread, so please do not substitute bread spread in these recipes!

Rachel Allen’s Baked Berry Cheesecake

10 digestive biscuits

2 tbsp. melted butter

Two handfuls of cherries or whatever other berries you can obtain

450g cream cheese

1tsp vanilla essence

150g sugar

4 eggs

Combine the biscuits and butter to fine crumb consistency (you can either blitz them in a mixie or bash the biscuits in a plastic bag with a rolling pin) and flatten the mixture over the bottom of a 9” round loose-bottomed cake tin. Use the whole cherries/berries to cover the base and then refrigerate the pan for half an hour. Whisk all the remaining ingredients together till light and creamy and simply tip over the fruit base and even out on top with a spatula. Bake in a preheated oven at 180®C for 40 minutes till the cake is golden on the top and set in the centre. Cool to room temperature and then refrigerate before serving.

Alton Brown’s Sour Cream Cheesecake

10 digestive biscuits

2 tbsp. melted butter

10 oz./ 280g cream cheese

¾ cup sour cream

½ cup sugar

½ tbsp. vanilla extract

1 egg

1 ½ egg yolks

1/6 cup cream

Combine butter and biscuits to make an even crumb base and line the bottom of a cake tin. Refrigerate for half an hour or bake for 10 minutes at 180®C and let cool. Beat the sour cream in a large mixing bowl lightly for 10 seconds. Add the cream cheese and sugar and mix on low for 30 seconds, then turn the speed up to medium and mix, while scraping the sides of the bowl and keeping it all together. In a separate bowl, lightly combine the vanilla, eggs, yolks and cream. Slowly pour the cheese mix into the egg one while still beating on medium. Once completely combined, pour the mixture into the cooled crust and set it in a shallow water bath (i.e. in an ovenproof dish filled with water that comes halfway up the sides of the cake tin). Bake at 120®C in a preheated oven for an hour. Turn off the oven, open the door for a minute, and then close again for an hour. Remove the cheesecake from the bath and refrigerate at least 6 hours before serving.

                           My first attempt at the Mascarpone Lemon, from long ago.

Mascarpone Lemon Cheesecake

10 digestive biscuits

2 tbsp. butter

9oz cream cheese

½ cup sugar

2 eggs

2 tbsp. lemon juice

1 tsp. vanilla essence

1 tsp. grated lemon zest

200g mascarpone cheese

3 tbsp. of a good jam to top (optional)

Wrap a pie/cake tin in two tight layers of foil up to the edge of the sides. Combine the butter and biscuits as usual and press into the base of the tin. Refrigerate for half an hour. Preheat the oven to 175®C. Beat the cream cheese until smooth, then adding sugar gradually until blended. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well and scraping the sides of the bowl between additions. Add the lemon juice, zest and essence, then the mascarpone, beat till smooth. Pour into the prepared tin and bake in a water bath as before, at 175®C for an hour, rotating the pan in the oven after 30 minutes for even baking. If desired, melt the jam in a tablespoon of water and glaze the top of the cheesecake before refrigerating when cool.

P.S. Sorry for the horrid mobile camera photo!

Enjoy!

The Iron Lady vs. Julia Child

I watched The Iron Lady yesterday. It was not the monumental, moving film I had thought it would be. Indeed, if you go to it expecting something of the sublimity of recent years’ British biopics that fared well at the Oscars (I’m thinking of those royalty films), this stodgy and unremarkable tale of Britain’s most stodgy and unattractive woman will leave you cold and hungry like the Trade Unionists she starved on her Conservative budget.

What I did come away with from it was an interesting take on how it compared to the last Meryl Streep film that really stayed with me, Julie and Julia. In fact, only a fortnight ago, after watching that film for the umpteenth time on TV, I half-composed this damning blogpost on the seductions of cookery and the new food writing fads that were only seeking to replace women in the categories where they’d belonged before. Here’s an excerpt from that post:

“…this post is certainly not some empty celebration of food and cooking. Because if anything, marriage and having to cook, sometimes against your will, every single day of your life, has really made me rethink whether I want to elevate cooking to that sacred pedestal in my life, the way I know some of my friends do….

Because cooking doesn’t fill the void. I hate to say this, and I’m sure my discontent comes from some inbuilt superiority complex I must get rid of, but the fact is, I am not JUST some good cook (and there are plenty of them).”

Enjoyable though it may be, Julie and Julia is, above all, a film that portrays the quest of two women to transform their experiences in the kitchen/food writing from being just something ‘to do’ to being something they ‘did’, a magnum opus. That kind of thing has always made me uncomfortable. Maybe it is because I have been the child of a woman who had many more tricks up her sleeve than just cooking, and is remembered more as a good professional than a good cook, both of which she is. I know many women don’t get the opportunity to shine in other fields and it is a kind of masculine professional elitism to look down on those who turn their cooking into their lives. Either way, I don’t think slotting women in the cooking and handicrafts category is empowerment enough, and least of all for educated women with better opportunities. Call it reverse patriarchy, I don’t care; its practical feminism for me. That is why I was very taken with one of the early scenes in The Iron Lady, where the young Margaret Roberts tells her soon-to-be-husband, Dennis Thatcher:

“I will never be one of those women who stays silent and pretty on the arm of her husband, or remote and alone in the kitchen doing the washing up, for that matter. One’s life must matter, beyond all the cooking and the cleaning and the children, one’s life must mean more than that. I cannot die washing up a teacup; I mean it.”

It was somewhat tragic for me that the best part of the film came and went in the first third, because thereon it was all clichéd and lazy scriptwriting, pitching the soprano Thatcher against an army of patriarchal wolves in Parliament, all the while trying to assert her maternal qualities and the sacrifices her family made. It was just the worst kind of film, reifying every stereotype you could imagine about a woman prime minister. They could have done a lot more with Maggie Thatcher and Meryl Streep; god, what a wasted opportunity.

Huh

You know? What the fuck, I feel like writing today.

I spent the whole day indoors because no matter how much free time this job gives me, I always feel like I don’t have any. I was so frustrated by the download speed Reliance punishes me with for crossing my quota, that I was forced to finally watch that Korean film I had buried somewhere in my HDD, I Saw the Devil. I have been intelligently avoiding these sadomasochistic Korean gore movies because they do nothing but depress you or turn you on, depending on what type you are. But boredom drives me into the depths of my hard drive (who names these things anyway), and there it was, staring unblinking at me.

Ah yes, more lost innocence, crazed revenge, forced sex, brutal hacking of bodies and blood. What is wrong with these Korean filmmakers, I don’t know. And to think I had The Iron Lady waiting to be watched, but I chose this.

Who cares for coherence and cohesion? They are just words I use in my technical communication class (yes, the one where geeky science students fall in love with their English teachers) to tell kids how to write paragraphs they will never read again. Do we use these tools to write the academic papers all our colleagues will judge us by but no one will ever read?

I did not go to work today because some American academic was presenting a paper at our weekly seminar and there were big words in her abstract that I couldn’t care less about. Is this why they advise us to marry outside our professions? So that we can have momentary (or longer) glimpses of how utterly absurd our daily vocations are; how completely bizarre our research is becoming? Am I disenchanted, or am I disenchanted? Not a good thing to be when you have just started out on obtaining your research doctorate. No, really. Because now nothing will really separate me from that peripheral-college-teaching housewifely English professor I sometimes scornfully observe from afar on the metro, chatting about jewellery and handicrafts with her heavily pregnant colleague.

My brother-in-law’s FIFA ’12 gaming CD arrived in the mail today, marking the official end of any control I had whatsoever on the TV-watching habits in this household. Things have gone from Malayalam movies all day, to football all day to PS3 all day. As a woman, I must be a failure.

But I must still go to the market to buy my veggies and proteins now because my husband will be home soon. Of course I’m now a man-hater.

Did someone say feminazi? That’s my word of the day.

Kept Women

Miss T wants to marry her boyfriend. They have just formally moved in together, after a year of the good life, and neither of them are getting any younger. She wants to have babies and settle down before time runs out and she has finally found Mr. Right. It couldn’t get any better, except that he isn’t from the same community as she is. But she is a woman of courage and as all women of courage must do, she is ready to battle her family for him. There is just one small hitch: her parentally-managed bank account. No, of course she wasn’t managing to live the life of an heiress on her government salary, and Mr. Right is hardly on Wall Street. Yes, her parents ‘keep’ an account for her so she is never short. This permits her to pay half her salary as rent, sample the Lobster Thermidor at the Smoke House Grill, buy that bandage dress from Bebe and pay income tax. What would become of her if she spurned her parents’ obstinate wishes and married her man? She has faced such consequences before and she knows how hard they bite, so she is doing everything she can to sue for peace talks and prevent such an outcome.

Mr. Ji’s cousin, Miss S is on the marriage market. She has that one unfortunate thing no girl can get rid of - unsympathetic parents – and they are pushing her to consider proposals and alliances from all sorts of socially inept or downright unattractive young men. Last week, when one of these proposals escalated in intensity she was faced with a very awkward situation: the proposed groom had fabulous credentials and a great job, came from a very comfortable and aristocratic family and had a heart of gold, but was also Mr. Ji’s (yes, my husband’s) college buddy. So there were inordinate expectations from all round; her parents, his parents, and my silly husband. If the boy is such a catch, what would be the problem, you wonder. He weighs 115 kilograms. Yes, 115. And no, that’s not because he’s 7 feet tall.

Putting weight aside, because she is a genuinely sensitive person, Miss S decided to give it a go anyway. Encouraged, her big-shot corporate exec of a father handed over his debit card to her, telling her to buy something nice to wear for their meeting. This didn’t seem strange to her because she has been used to a life of parental dependency. So she went to the nearest mall and fell fast for a knee-length black number with a steel grey bolero, and wore that to the date. You don’t have to be from my community to realize how daring that little trick was, but it was more about the debit card than the date, you understand.

She tells me that even 2 minutes into their meeting, she realized his weight was not the problem but that they were simply an incompatible pair. She too outgoing and excitable, he as introverted and passive as could possibly be. She went home resolved to say no, but her parents turned a deaf ear to her pleas and moved on to step 2. Distraught, she plotted revenge with the debit card in one hand, while with the other she avowed to me on the phone that she would leave home soon. I didn’t quite believe her but this morning she called to tell me she is running away for good and has everything worked out. I have been having an anxiety attack ever since.

My life has not been very different. In my college days, my eldest cousin was my local guardian, and she would keep the money intended for my expenditure in the locker of a Godrej almirah in her guest bedroom. I knew where the keys were, but in the early days I would ask her to hand me an amount instead of helping myself to anything. Things changed. While my classmates had bank accounts with fixed monthly sums and disciplined parents, I had just this stash in my cousin’s cupboard. I ate out, bought hardbound books, and gave generous loans to friends. When I ran out, I would just go home and put my hand into the locker. When the stash ran out, I would phone home and tell them. My parents would issue a stern warning that I was over the top, but would send more anyway. This odd cycle went on for years. When I began working, I had never known what fiscal discipline was. The pre-6^th Pay Commission salary that colleges doled out to me was getting me nowhere. Every month something cropped up: a flight ticket, a household appliance or a trip out of town. I never had enough money and my poor father only knew how to issue faint verbal reprimands, but not to say no. No big difference at that point of my life between me and Miss T, or Miss S. It was only after the 6^th pay commission that things began to ease out, but by then the damage had been done.

When a girl takes money from her parents it is a lynchpin. It isn’t as if society doesn’t already bind us firmly to their whims. Even financially independent girls have a hard time saying no to their parents but it is impossibly worse if you have been dependent on them. At every turn in the course of an Indian girl’s personal history before 30, her parents will go hysterical and try to blackmail her into obeying them, but that blackmail is worst when it involves financial obligations or threats. My parents never threatened me, but I felt the guilt of my debts to them looming like a thundercloud over my head all through the years when they were trying to marry me off. After all, I had lived well and saved nothing on the sole sinecure of a comfortable inheritance. Who was I to look my personal gift horse(s) in the mouth and say no to an arranged marriage? I don’t mean to sound like a feminazi; I have often been told, even by students, that I overstate the effect of economics on human relationships. At least in that way, I like to think, Marx has done me some good. Nothing is more real than money and money matters most to young women in the modern world. It can decide your freedom, your life choices, your future. I have learned most of my life-lessons on money post-marriage to Mr. Ji so I consider myself a late bloomer on that account, but I know all too well that there is little difference between depending on parents and depending on your husband, so now I do neither.

Still, some transactions you just can’t reverse.

P.S. If you're wondering about the Gosling meme, it's only because you're a useless feminist and you haven't yet seen feministryangosling.tumblr.com

Senna

One of my favourite subjects for discussion when I meet first year English students for their first lectures, is one of the themes of Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines – public and private memory. How they relate to each other, how they differ, and what they really are. I make students perform the simplest of exercises: remember where they were, what they were doing and how they reacted when one of the larger news events in recent public memory happened. Even in the three years I have been teaching the novel, the event I have had to pin students’ memories to have always differed with every batch. At first, the conscientious batch said Kargil, next year it was 9/11, sometimes 26/11. These were the options they offered me, but strangely, I always instinctively went for death. Death is what I remember first – where I was when Rajiv Gandhi died, or Princess Di, or Michael Jackson, or even Versace. I know, deep down there is very little intellect separating me from Perez Hilton, you must think. It might be true.

I have an instinct for death. It binds me to the farthest corners of human civilisation. I feel, through death, we participate briefly in the one inevitable, and it is the most comforting moment in celebrity. To know that even the immortals died, somehow, makes this world a little easier to accept.

One of the unlikelier deaths that deeply affected me in my childhood was that of Ayrton Senna. It was 1994 and I was 11 when the three-time world champion Formula One driver, heralded as the great genius of his generation, was killed in a crash at the San Morino Grand Prix. What part of this epic sporting tragedy could possibly touch the life of a silly 11 year old girl, you might wonder. I don’t know. I do not, oddly, remember what I was doing when I heard of Senna’s death. I do not even remember if I knew of Senna as a sporting great before his death. All I now remember clearly is that I must have been moved by the grand scale of the tragedy, the public outburst, the controversy, the loss, and above all, the enigma, even in death, that Senna’s magnetic personality created. I remember thinking how incredibly handsome he was, how beatific he looked. I must have devoured the newspapers and magazines for weeks. The memory of it stayed with me well into my adulthood, where everytime I see a speeding car, or a bird flying into a window pane, I think of Senna. When I look back at it now, I am amazed that someone as silly as me at that age, would have been affected at all by such an event. That must have been the long arm of Senna’s charisma.

It all came back to me this evening as I sat watching Asif Kapadia’s latest film, a documentary named after the legendary driver. This is the thing about documentaries, isn’t it: they always pretend to be dry historical narratives but then that melancholic string section creeps in and the commentary is edited just so, the slow-mo just so, and you find yourself in tears. In the case of this film, I suppose I should have seen it coming, since Kapadia is no documentary-maker and has always had a flair for the dramatic. You will find yourself caught in a web here – the editing and narrative are nothing short of a homage to the fierce mystique that was Senna himself. With no prosaic denotations of name and contributor, no dates and places to watermark the screen and nothing at all in terms of outer frame to draw the viewer away from the sheer beauty of Senna’s character, talent and articulation, you have nowhere to turn.

I think Kapadia chose an easy subject. It is a bit like writing an art essay on The Mona Lisa, there is just so much to be said and so much to work with. Senna was that rare thing: an exceedingly articulate and emotive sportsperson from a non-Anglicized background. I’m sure it has a lot to do with choice and editing, but this film could have you believe Senna was a poet. Every word he says carries its weight in thought; indeed I had to snap myself out of his hypnotic diction and remind myself these would be excerpts from interviews and not scripted narrative. Perfect English grammar, intelligent statements, I am almost depressed that I was so young in his heyday and must now suffer the linguistic torture of the Nadals, the Rooneys and Dhonis. It must have been a different time in sport then.

It was also a different sport. I will say this – I do not and have never liked Formula One racing. It is one of those monotonous masculine sports I have never come to love, though this film might just convert a few lost souls. I have always associated it with moneyed backgrounds and politics, an issue the film highlights sensitively. Ah yes, I was complaining about documentaries, wasn’t I. Senna pitches Ayrton Senna da Silva as moneyed and well-bred, certainly, but basically from struggling third world Brazil. I had to try very hard to read against the grain of the film, to disbelieve that this perfectly articulate and handsome young man was representative of an impoverished populace that needed a hero. I suppose the beatific smile and humble demeanor helped keep up that image a great deal. Senna’s arch-rival Alain Prost emerges an easy villain of the piece with his big French nose and comic accent. We choose our sides too easily in the Senna vs. Prost debate, helped on greatly by some good editing and strong third vs. first world sentimentality.

Kapadia also chooses to portray Senna as deeply religious. While this is factually true, I suspect the director’s and scriptwriter’s Indian backgrounds made it easier for them to tackle an otherwise unpopular subject head-on. Senna’s Catholic devoutness is subtly written into his life story like a well-concealed murder weapon, so we do not question his ‘love of truth’ and justice or his self-fashioned priestly indignance and finally, we gracefully accept that his death was ‘a gift from God’. Hm. As a secret Bible-reader myself, I got carried away with it all.