My grandmother had a good thing a’goin’!
Sometime in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s my grandmother came up with a lemon cheesecake recipe. It was light and fluffy and a bit tangy. She tweaked it into the following:
2 sticks butter8 oz cream cheese
2 C sugar
2 large cans cream, chilled (Pet or Carnation evaporated milk)
3 small lemon Jell-O
1 1/3 C hot water
Graham Cracker Crust
Mix cream cheese and sugar together. Add the water to the Jell-O and set aside. Add cream cheese and sugar to the Jell-O and whip until blended. Whip the cream one at a time and add to the mixture.
Stir all together and pour into crust.
Chill, covered with foil, in the refrigerator.
That recipe leaves out a good bit of information. Like that this recipe fills a 12″ x 18″ pan. Or that if the evaporated milk isn’t very very very cold, it hardly whips. Or that it takes a box of graham cracker crumbs to make a crust that large. This is frequently the way with vintage recipes – not everything is written down.
I’ve tweaked and updated the recipe and morphed it into the following versions – with, I think, easy to follow directions. There are future plans for a chocolate version and hopes for a blueberry version.
Whipped Cream made from Evaporated Milk
