On my way to shul, I discovered the best cheesecake in London - The Jewish Chronicle

By the time you read this I will be in Malta on the kind of reality travel show I tend to avoid. This one has a Coronation Street cast, so I shall be soaking up the historic culture, sampling the fusion food, learning the Maltese version of Morris dancing – (Mumba?) – and possibly zip-gliding across a medieval cave with a teenager. Who knows?

There won’t have been much talk of Shavuot, the Book of Ruth or the cheesecake situation in Valetta but you win some you lose some. Nothing can touch the cheesecake in Connaught Street anyway. I don’t want you to pass this on but it is death by curd. I have been known to buy a whole cake on a Monday and to have imbibed it by Friday. It is from a Basque cheesecake shop called La Maritxu and all day long there is a gentle queue of punters waiting for their fix.

I kept seeing this little queue and was curious enough to stop off on my journey to the West London Synagogue to see what all the fuss was about. It was about heaven on a plate with pretty good coffee. That’s it. A cheesecake-only shop. I love a niche.

The owner was an architect who baked her grandmother’s cheesecake for friends who gobbled it with such alacrity that she put down her scale rule and picked up her non-stick, springform cake tin and the rest is bliss to me.

Speaking of niche shops, there is a halva shop in New York that leaves you gasping. Halva divides people, like Marmite, and it always reminds me of the first time I gave my dog peanut butter. The look on her face! The way the flavour clung to the roof of her mouth, the perplexed expression. That is halva for me. But rhubarb halva? Liquorice halva and chocolate halva are small bites that will more than fill my sweet-tooth gap.

I am fond of a cake. A slice of my mother’s date-and-walnut cake works on me like Prozac works for movie stars. I love a fruit cake, a malt loaf with butter or an apple cake but the cream eclairs, meringues and fancies I fancied in my youth hold no farinaceous allure for me in my dotage.

Those small, ubiquitous Portuguese custardy jobs, Maids of Honour with its secret recipe, cream-cheese frosting or marzipan anything will do it for me, but an American cheesecake of broken biscuits, Graham crackers and Philadelphia have no place in my lexicon of desire. Nor, does the heavy baked eastern European cheesecake with sultanas I would crave as I passed Morgans or Blooms in the days of yore. This cheesecake is so light and creamy and lemony that you are scarcely aware of the cellulite spread that must of needs accompany it.

As for the Book of Ruth, traditionally read at Shavuot, “Whither thou goest, I shall go. Where you go, I will go and where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people and your God my God” is such a powerful statement of unwavering commitment that it is etched in my brain from all those hated cheder lessons on Sunday when all I wanted was a lie-in and another chapter from a jolly boarding school book.

Mind you, Naomi must have been some discreet and restrained mother-in-law. Capable and loving as my own mother-in-law was, I can’t imagine leaving London life to accompany her to Bispham, near Blackpool, where she lived in the beloved bungalow my husband Jack bought her with the spoils that came from writing for Coronation Street. Mostly, she lived in her garden where she mysteriously mated her cucumbers with a paint brush – I didn’t ask – nurtured and fed her tangy tomatoes and browned like a nut, on a kneeling mat, planting lupins and antirrhinums.

What sort of a mother-in-law I have turned out to be is for others to assess. Last Wednesday night, though, my daughter-in-law, Taina, was stitching Ava, my granddaughter, into my pink silk pleated Ray Harris top, then racing to cut the video backdrop that accompanied our Climate Change Cabaret at the Crazy Coqs, in Piccadilly, and back to her tripod to film the whole venture for posterity. Apparently, she crawled up on stage to disentangle me from my mike wire. I didn’t notice. My “Good” was certainly her Good that night.

She did all this with grace and charm and sent in no bill. She is a fine cinematographer and raced over, a few weeks ago, to film me on a “self-tape” for a possible job. It took a whole afternoon and after it was emailed to the production company I heard not one word. Not even “Thanks, we got it – your accent is rubbish.’’ So if that’s how they treat me, after 59 years masking tragedy with comedy, just think how they treat newcomers. Time was that you could meet producers face to face and convince them you were more what they had in mind than what they actually had in mind. Now you learn a few scenes, film them yourself and send it off to a graceless and empty cloud.

At the cabaret Ava, 13, opened the evening with one of her own poems and Thelma Ruby, aged 100 not out, ended it with a sketch and a sing-song. In between, Jacqui Dankworth and her husband Charlie wove intricate jazz riffs around Some of These Days, The Party’s Over and Too Darn Hot and Jeremy Robson’s poetry and my sketches raised roofs.

One poem by Pauline Prior-Pitt about Eve defending her actions brought the house down as well as the roof:

“Look, I’m sorry about

that ****ing apple,

I was just newly made

had no role models

Didn’t think beyond the bite.’”

Of course, the first man Adam had no mother-in-law. Some might say, though not me obviously, that that’s why he lived in Paradise.

Topics:

Shavuot