Despite what we said in the introduction, we know our cheesecake recipe has previously appeared in a copyrighted work; but even though Nela’s Cookbook was a wonderful combination of recipes and memoir, we have no idea whether Aunt Nela got the recipe from Mamcik, or vice versa, or whether they both got it from someone else. Aunt Nela was our paternal grandmother’s younger sister – at least, she was one of them.

Our grandmother had seven siblings, but after World War II, only three of them were alive and talked of: our grandmother, Aunt Nela, and their older brother Bronek, who was captured by the Nazis in the first year of the war and spent the rest in concentration camps. God only knows what happened to the rest of them. At the end of the war, our widowed great-grandmother Anna Mlynarski (whom we called “Babciu” or “Bop”), found herself trapped at the family home, Ilgovo, in Lithuania, facing the advancing Russian Army. She managed to get on a westbound train, but outraged that no food or water had been provided for the refugees, got off at the first stop to find some. The train left without her; although she was then in her seventies, she walked west until she made it to Allied territory. We don’t know how she got out of Europe, but she did end up living in Kansas City with our grandparents when she wasn’t visiting Aunt Nela and Uncle Arthur in Los Angeles or Paris. And in that Kansas City house at 58^th and Grand, Mamcik made this cheesecake for family and friends.

Please don’t be like one of Mamcik’s cheesecake recipients who confessed she threw away the cheesecake because it had black specks in it, and she was afraid it had gone bad. We all know now what vanilla bean looks like, right?

• 16 ounces cream cheese
• 1 cup sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1 inch of vanilla bean
• 3 teaspoons lemon juice
• 1 cup sour cream
• 1 cup powdered sugar
• About ¾ box of vanilla wafers
• About 1 tablespoon butter, melted

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In food processor or blender, process vanilla wafers into crumbs. Mix lightly with butter, and press into bottom of 9-inch springform pan.

Split the vanilla bean and scrape seeds out; save bean pod.* In mixer, blend cream cheese, sugar and vanilla bean seeds. Add eggs and lemon juice and mix until creamy. Pour into springform pan, and bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Remove from oven, and cool about 15 minutes.

While cake is cooling, mix sour cream and powdered sugar; pour over cake. Chill about 6 hours or overnight before serving.

*We save the bean pods and toss them into a canister of powdered sugar – it makes the sugar smell and taste wonderful. But you also can mix bean pods with spirits to make your own vanilla extract. Save your used bean pods in a tightly covered glass jar, stored in a cool place. When you have about 5-7 pods’ worth, combine the scraped pods with 8 ounces of good quality vodka, bourbon or light rum. Place in a tightly closed container. Once a week, shake the container to mix. In eight weeks, you have homemade vanilla extract.