Cheesecake Recipes & More From Cheesecakes To Go

Deirdre von Ansbach was a delightful piece of work. In the best and most outrageous tradition of Mame’s Agnes Gooch, she had lived. She quit walking down the aisle once she acquired a “von” in her last name. She took on airs, as some might say (and some did). But she had a regal aura from the time she could walk. To be sure, her doting parents treated her like a little princess. They didn’t have much in the way of money but when it came to creating charming little gifts out of nothing, they excelled. They found new uses for paper scribbled on just one side. For vines and shrunken apples folded in on themselves. For stones and rocks. For sipping straws “liberated” from an ice cream parlor. Even from spent toothpaste tubes from which absolutely nothing more could be squeezed, even with the help of a vise. With glue, wire, paper clips, string, an old jelly glass, a spool of thread minus the thread, a cracked dish, Deirdre’s parents delighted her with surprise combinations of shape and texture.Her gift to them was excelling in school, earning spending money by designing and making clothes for her friends with enough left over to create stunning outfits for herself. Two or three times a week, she prepared scrumptious meals topped off with desserts, artistic creations that melted in the mouth. Before she was thirty, she had her own line of clothing (the label read simply, “Deirdre”) and a major corporation had purchased her recipes for three desserts – glorious cheesecakes – that could be found in the frozen food section. She was rich. Very, very rich. She traveled extensively, enlarging her circle of acquaintances, discovering new sources for exotic fabrics, new styling ideas, and new husbands but after the “von,” she dallied only with new lovers. She not only burned the candle at both ends, she melted it in the middle. For decades she led a merry chase of a life until the afternoon she wondered if she were having a heart attack.

When she presented herself at a hospital’s emergency room and mentioned chest pains, she was whisked through triage and hooked up for an EKG and wheeled to a bed within a curtained space where her forearm was prepared to receive an IV, should that become necessary. Within seconds, she was breathing oxygen and hooked to a heart monitor. Vials of blood were rushed to the lab. One by one, attendants, nurses, interns, doctors, even a hospitality representative, parted a curtain enough to enter into her allotted space. Her medical history was taken. Everyone with a stethoscope listened to her chest, her back, even her ankles. Everyone said, “Describe what happened” and everyone asked, “Are you having any pain?” She wasn’t and she was beginning to feel like a ninny. The medical consensus was to admit her, keep her overnight.

Once she was ensconced in a room in the cardiac wing, she asked that her assistant whom she had abandoned in the waiting room be allowed to come to her bedside. When the unctuous Randolph strode the wide hallway, resplendent in velvet slacks and a sharkskin jacket festooned with a wild print on a silk scarf, eyebrows shot up, jaws dropped, eyes blinked. Deirdre rattled off whispered directions to Randolph who nodded understanding, swiveled and marched out into the hallway, vowing, “I shall return!” and then he immediately destroyed the calculated MacArthur illusion with a naughty wink. An orderly standing near a supply closet tingled all over.

Within an hour, delivery trucks snarled the parking apron that flanked the main entrance. Led by Randolph, a flotilla of off-loaders carrying large domed trays and towers of shiny lime green boxes emblazoned with a golden D overwhelmed the staff’s protests that patients were restricted to only two visitors. “My dear woman,” Randolph said, “we’re calling on every patient on the floor!” Deirdre bored almost to tears by what seemed to have been the heart attack that never was, clapped her hands with glee and decreed that her famous cheesecake tarts garnished with fruit or syrups or whipped cream were to be presented to everyone in the cardiac wing – patients, staff, visitors – and that everyone was also to receive a lasting souvenir of her visit – one of her unrestrained prints woven into oversized square scarves. Nurses at the hub of the floor where they monitored the vital signs of certain patients were alarmed by a succession of rapid beeps but which subsided quickly, replaced by the steady rhythms of relaxed and healing hearts, made happy by colorful shimmering scarves and the pleasure of digesting delectable cheesecakes as smooth as the silky scarves.

– Scarlet O’Cheesecake