Cheesecake with fresh cherries

Before going any further, this is Nigel Slater’s cheesecake. I tell you this because should you visit Mr. Slater’s website, as I often do, you might encounter this alarming sentence:

“Litigators tenaciously protect Nigel Slater’s rights.”

Believe me, I have no intention of violating Nigel Slater’s rights, or anyone else’s, for that matter. I have no interest whatsoever in being pursued by litigators. I have enough problems, thank you very much. Plus I fervently believe in crediting recipes.

This business aside, cheesecake. Or the makings thereof.

Well, not yet. Shall we discuss the news? I have no wisdom to impart. Had I any, would I be writing about cheesecake?

The more I write about the news, the more the little “readability” icon on my right, just above the “SEO” icon, shades orange. You, dear readers, cannot see these. The idea in blogland is to ensure these icons are a nice happy green. Greens means easy to read. Green means you are not discussing plagiarized speeches, frighteningly fascist language, (typing fascist turned it red, people, red!) or shocking levels of vulgarity.

Green means we’re talking about cheesecake.

At times I wanted to call this recipe Nigel’s Fraught Cheesecake. This had nothing to do with Mr. Slater and everything to do with metrics vs. imperial measures. This cheesecake hails from Slater’s magisterial Tender. Tender is published in two volumes: the first is about vegetables, the second, fruits. It is consecutively paginated, making for 1,226 elegant pages of prose. A wonderful thing, except in my case Vol 1 is the American release, Vol 2, the English. Meaning Vol. 2’s recipes are in metric increments.

I am in possession of numerous English cookbooks, meaning I have some experience with metric recipes. Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s the simplest thing in the word, multiples of ten, whereas Imperial makes no sense at all, should be discarded, etc, etc. The US is the last country to use Imperial except, I don’t know, Burkina Faso and one other nation. We’re so behind.

I know. The thing is, I am really, really terrible at math. Have I ever mentioned this? And I’ve used Imperial my entire life, so it’s engraved on my brain pan.

I wisely sought professional counsel. The New York Times Cookbook has an excellent conversion table on its inside front cover. Thank you, Amanda Hesser.

Have you ever noticed the food processor always refuses to chew up one of whatever you’re processing? I feel honor-bound to point out the cookie between 10-11:00 in this photo. Crush this outlier yourself. Or eat it.

Speaking of honor-bound, this recipe, as Elizabeth David would say, is something of a performance. Anything requiring both the food processor and KitchenAid qualifies, in my book. This said, it isn’t difficult.

A few notes…you’ll think there isn’t enough butter to meld with the cookie crumbs when forming the crust. There is. Keep mixing.

I used an 8×8 square baking tin, and the filling came to the absolute top. Unless you possess extremely steady hands–I do not–It’s wise to place your baking tin on a baking sheet. If said baking sheet is nonstick, your baking tin might slide. Take it from me. So lay down a sheet of foil or a Silpat on your baking sheet. Now you have a nice sturdy handhold, and if the tin sloshes, you won’t have to clean up the oven.

Slater advises cooling the cheesecake in the oven, then chilling it overnight. Even after cooling in the oven, the pan bottom was still extremely hot. I set it on a rack to cool at room temperature for about an hour before refrigerating.

Below, the cake cooling in the oven.

Slater gives no storage advice. In Nigella Kitchen, Nigella Lawson says cheesecake may be double-wrapped in plastic wrap, covered with foil, then frozen for a month. Eat within two days of defrosting. I froze the cake in individual pieces, as our days of consuming entire cheesecakes within 48 hours have become misty and nostalgic, lumped into the same era of tape decks and rational politics.

Slater describes this cake as “drier,” than some cheesecakes, with an “open-textured crumb.” Light, not overly sweet, it’s the perfect summer cheesecake.

In terms of cherry topping, we used fresh fruit, because it’s in season.

You could open a jar of Eugenia’s Baked Cherry Jam, too. Or use the best cherry jam you can find. It’s also wonderful eaten plain.

A final bit of throat clearing: Slater calls for vanilla extract. I used almond to delicious effect.