Food You Can Eat: “Busy-Day” Lemon Cheesecake from 1959

If you make this, you'll thank me, and the "Mad Men"-era sales and ad execs at the Jell-O corp who placed this spon-con in lots of magazines

From the Golden Age of magazine food illustration

This could not be simpler nor more delicious. This comes highly recommended for not only when you are having a busy day, but also when the thought of turning the oven on fills you with despair and all you want to do is consume chilled food and drink.

Ingredients

1 large (8 oz) package cream cheese

2 cups whole milk

1 package (3-3/4-ounces) Jell-O Lemon INSTANT pudding mix

1 8-inch graham cracker crust

Instructions

Soften cream cheese, blend with 1/2 cup milk.

Add remaining milk and the instant pudding mix. Beat slowly with egg beater just until well mixed, about 1 minute. (Do not overbeat.)

Pour at once into graham cracker crust. Sprinkle graham cracker crumbs lightly over top. Chill about an hour.

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10 Comments

    • That would have infused it with the spirit of aloha. But come to think of it, I don’t think lemons are really grown in Hawaii. I don’t know why. I think they’d have the climate for it. Plenty of pineapple, sugar cane, and coffee is. And all the flowers that they turn into leis domestically and ship back to the mainland.

      • Rereading this comment: I meant to say something like cut flowers or flower arrangements they ship back to the mainland. I don’t think you can really get leis on the mainland. Maybe on the West Coast.

    • Lucky you! Although we had sheets and sheets of brownies, blondies, and peanut butter brownies. And surprisingly no peanut allergies, despite the fact that we were vaccinated by mandate up to the gills. I don’t know where peanut allergies suddenly are coming from, but lots of people seem to have them. And, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., I can’t believe it’s from vaccines because I would imagine the stuff we all took, including yourself, I’m sure, must have been best-in-class in its day but…

      • We had someone with anaphylactic level allergies in my class, but I don’t remember to what. Probably shellfish, since back in the 90s that would not have been something kids would encounter in school snacks or lunches in the midwest catholic school. Even Lent lunches were things like grilled cheese, pasta without meat, etc. They weren’t even making things like fish sticks for us (probably because the cafeteria manager didn’t want to smell fish sticks for hours).

        • I think I detailed before, actually I know I did, that I tried to arrange for a day of the week where we ate no meat. I had a vintage cookbook devoted to recipes in accordance with Woodrow Wilson’s WWI-era Meatless Tuesdays decree, or advice, or whatever. He and his administration make for a fascinating read, if you’re interested.

          But I kept forgetting about Tuesday, so I thought, “I went to a nominally public school system but the vast majority of the kids were Catholic, and more importantly their property taxpaying parents were pre-Vatican II Catholics, so there was never any meat on the lunchtime menu on any Friday, ever, throughout the year.” So, that habit felt a little more familiar, and I switched to Pescatarian Fridays. That’s worked out pretty well so far and has forced me to flex into more seafood and vegetarian meals. Which aren’t difficult, I make them all the time, just unself-consciously.

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