Frozen Raspberry Cheesecake

The first tomatoes ripened this week. The Brandywines on the south fence had been showing color for ten days and Tuesday morning the first one was fully red, heavy on the vine, the kind of tomato that announces itself before you see it because the air around it has the particular tomato smell that ripe tomatoes broadcast. I picked it carefully, took it inside, sliced it on the wooden board, salted the slices, ate them at the counter with a piece of bread and a smear of mayonnaise. There are a small number of moments in a Vermont gardener's year that are non-negotiable, and the first ripe tomato eaten standing at the counter on the day it ripens is one of the non-negotiable ones, and I have been observing this moment for fifty years and intend to observe it for as many more as I am given.

The blog post on the first tomato was short — three paragraphs, the date, the variety, the eating of it — and was, by my standards, an exercise in restraint. The temptation in writing about a first tomato is to lapse into reverence, the lyrical mode, the over-description. I have learned not to. The first tomato says itself. The writer's job is to put it down on the page and get out of the way. The post pulled the same comments it pulls every year — gardeners reporting their own first tomatoes, non-gardeners writing in to say the post made them want to plant tomatoes — and I responded to a few of the more thoughtful ones and let the rest stand.

Made a panzanella Sunday with the early tomatoes and the day-old bread — torn bread, tomatoes cubed and salted to release their juice, a sweet onion sliced thin, fresh basil from the kitchen window, olive oil and red wine vinegar, salt and pepper. The salad sits for half an hour to let the bread soak up the tomato juice and the dressing, and what you get is the kind of summer dish that is greater than the sum of its parts and that exists almost entirely to celebrate the tomato at the center of it. I ate it on the porch with a glass of cold white wine and watched the late afternoon light move across the lawn and thought, for the duration of the salad, that there is no better life than this one.

James and Sam stopped by Sunday afternoon — they had been out for a drive and decided on impulse to come up. Sam brought a small bag of plums from the farmer's market in Burlington and a story about a friend of theirs whose grandfather had recently moved into assisted living and who was struggling with the transition, and James had been thinking about it on the drive up and had wanted to ask me the question that the friend's situation had raised. The question was: what does it mean to be old. He asked it with the slight self-consciousness of a young man asking a serious question of an old man and being uncertain whether the question was an insult. I told him it was not an insult. I told him that being old is what happens when a person has been alive for a long time and has accumulated the sediment of that long time, and that the sediment is mostly a benefit and occasionally a burden and that the sediment is the entire content of being old. He thought about that. He nodded. He said: that's a useful answer. I said: it is the answer I have at the moment, ask me again in five years and I will probably have a different one. He laughed. We talked for another half hour. They left at suppertime. The plums went into the bowl on the kitchen table. I ate three of them after they left. They were good plums.

After James and Sam left Sunday evening and the plums were sitting in the bowl and the panzanella was long gone, I found myself thinking about what you serve when summer arrives all at once — the tomatoes, the basil, the good company, the light on the lawn — and the answer I kept arriving at was something cold and fruit-forward, something that celebrates the season without competing with it. I had made this frozen raspberry cheesecake the week before with berries from the market, and it had been sitting in the freezer waiting for exactly this kind of afternoon. It is the dessert I reach for when the day has already been generous and I want the ending to be worthy of it.

Prep Time: 25 minutes | Cook Time: 0 minutes | Total Time: 4 hours 25 minutes (includes freezing) | Servings: 10

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs
1/4 cup granulated sugar
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
2 packages (8 oz each) cream cheese, softened
3/4 cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 cups fresh or frozen raspberries, divided
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 1/2 cups heavy whipping cream
Fresh raspberries and mint sprigs, for garnish

Instructions

Make the crust. Combine graham cracker crumbs, granulated sugar, and melted butter in a bowl and stir until the mixture resembles wet sand. Press firmly and evenly into the bottom of a 9-inch springform pan. Place in the freezer for 15 minutes to set.
Prepare the raspberry puree. Combine 1 1/2 cups of the raspberries and the lemon juice in a small saucepan over medium heat. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 5–6 minutes until the berries break down. Press through a fine-mesh sieve to remove seeds. Let the puree cool completely.
Beat the cream cheese base. In a large bowl, beat the softened cream cheese with an electric mixer on medium speed until smooth and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add the powdered sugar and vanilla extract and continue beating until fully incorporated and no lumps remain.
Fold in the raspberry puree. Add the cooled raspberry puree to the cream cheese mixture and stir until evenly combined and a uniform pink color throughout.
Whip the cream. In a separate chilled bowl, beat the heavy whipping cream with clean beaters until stiff peaks form. Gently fold the whipped cream into the raspberry cream cheese mixture in three additions, taking care not to deflate the cream.
Add the whole berries. Gently fold in the remaining 1/2 cup of whole raspberries.
Fill and freeze. Pour the filling over the chilled crust and smooth the top with a spatula. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and freeze for at least 4 hours, or overnight, until completely firm.
Serve. Remove from the freezer 10 minutes before serving to soften slightly. Release and remove the springform ring. Garnish with fresh raspberries and mint sprigs, slice with a warm knife, and serve immediately.

Nutrition (per serving)

Frozen Raspberry Cheesecake — A Porch Dessert for the Best Day of Summer