SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
There's a saying that everything in New York winds up being about real estate. Mark Kurlansky's new novel is set mostly on one block of New York's Upper West Side that sees a lot of change from the 1970s on but begins with a cheesecake - one that traces back to Cato the Elder.
MARK KURLANSKY: (Reading) He was one of Rome's most right-wing politicians, the kind of figure who could not get elected dogcatcher on the Upper West Side, if such a position - God forbid - existed in the neighborhood. But more than 2,000 years ago, Cato did something that had never been done before. He published a recipe. Once a recipe is published, there's no telling where it will go. It may live forever. Roman senators may not be immortal, but recipes can be.
SIMON: The novel is "Cheesecake," and Mark Kurlansky, the James Beard Award-winning food writer, joins us from our studios in New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
KURLANSKY: My pleasure.
SIMON: Tell us about the Katz Brothers diner, as they come to call it, on this block of West 86th.
KURLANSKY: These Greek immigrants who moved to New York to find their fortune, and they were told by people who had been there before that the way Greek immigrants get started is to have a diner. So they opened a diner, and they shortened their name to Katz. They called it the Katz Diner because they were told that the neighborhood was Jewish.
And it was a kind of a typical diner, you know? You got cheeseburgers and fries and things. The only thing special about it was that they made their own goat's cheese in Queens. But then they started seeing that the neighborhood was changing, which is what they wanted, why they came to the neighborhood. They were told it was a neighborhood in transition, and they wanted to be part of that transition and buy real estate. And at a certain point, they decided that this was no longer a place for a Greek diner and they needed to be an upscale restaurant, which they named Mykonos. And as one of the attractions, they decided that they were going to do the Cato cheesecake recipe from 160 BCE.
SIMON: And this is an actual recipe, right?
KURLANSKY: It is an actual recipe, yes. I give the recipe in the introduction of the book. One of the reasons I originally got interested in this whole idea of this cheesecake recipe - aside from the fact that it's absolutely fascinating to me that the first recipe would be for cheesecake, of all things - is that the recipe is completely incomprehensible. And if you try to follow it word for word, you end up with something totally inedible. So you can try it if you want. Good luck with that.
SIMON: You've written a number of what I'll just call deeply researched nonfiction books about food, including "Salt" and "Cod." Why is "Cheesecake" a novel?
KURLANSKY: Well, first, I should point out that it's not a new thing for me. This is my sixth book of fiction. And although I'm probably better known for nonfiction, I love writing fiction, and I love telling stories, making things up. You know, the fiction is all about making things up that are true.
And this book actually went through an evolution. Originally, I wrote a series of short stories about different groups on 86th Street who made Cato's cheesecake, and they all made it differently, and they all had very different events. And then I realized, well, wait a minute. If they're all living on the same block, they probably know each other and have contact with each other. And so I kind of mushed everything together and made it a novel.
SIMON: You've seen all this on the Upper West Side, haven't you - the food?
KURLANSKY: Yeah. I mean, I've lived on this block for maybe 27, 28 years, and I've seen tremendous change. And, you know, in a lot of ways, it's sad. You know, a lot of people have been driven out of homes they loved. Some of the old Jewish people talk about the disappearance of the landsleit, which is a Yiddish word which originally meant, you know, the old Jewish community, but they mean just the old community. But now when they talk about the disappearance of the landsleit, people frantically Google to try to find out what that word means.
SIMON: Look, I usually don't wind up interviews with novelists this way, but do you have a favorite cheesecake?
KURLANSKY: I loved my grandmother's cheesecake. Now, my grandmother was from Lithuania, but she - as a young girl, her family moved to the Lower East Side, and she grew up in the Lower East Side. And she made the kind of cheesecake that was made in Eastern Europe. It had no cream cheese in it. It was made with farmer's cheese - farmer's cheese and lemon. It had a pie crust. And you don't see cheesecake like this around very often. You know, in 1928, a guy named Arnold Reuben invented what is known as the New York cheesecake, which is with cream cheese and a graham cracker crust. But I really like this earlier version.
SIMON: Mark Kurlansky's new novel is "Cheesecake." Thank you so much for being with us.
KURLANSKY: My pleasure talking to you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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