It was negative three degrees on the day that I went to tour the Eli’s Cheesecake Factory and though it was bitterly cold the frigid air did nothing to dampen my eagerness to tour a refrigerated factory. If anything, the cold weather had caused me to bundle up so that I was amply prepared to walk into the room-sized blast chiller where the cheesecakes are placed and allowed to set. I hadn’t thought about this day for quite some time, but as I was roaming through the aisles of Shoprite the other day I caught a glimpse of an Eli’s cheesecake in the refrigerator section and it took me back to that brutally glacial day. Then, like a blow to the chest came the crystalizing realization that, even though it seems like Passover was just yesterday it was in fact two weeks ago and now I was looking down the barrel at Shavuot and I was woefully unprepared. That’s how it became clear to me that it was time to start thinking seriously about cheesecake.

Shavuot is easily one of my favorite holidays because it is the only Yom Tov that encourages us to eat ice cream at the end of a festive meal. Jewish culinary anthropologists will provide all sorts of reasons for this phenomenon, but I choose not to look a gift horse in the mouth and simply accept that there is no really solid halachic reason for eating dairy, it is simply a wonderful minhag (custom) that we developed at some point. The crowning achievement of this tradition is that (like so many of our other traditions) it decided to go for broke and take the single most dairy item in existence and add it as a staple to the Shavuot menu. I, of course, mean the glorious decadence that is cheesecake.