'Lost' recipe for legendary cheesecake found

Guys and Dolls," the 1950s-vintage Broadway musical hit based on Runyon's writings, featured Nathan Detroit (nom de guerre for prohibition-era gangster Arnold Rothstein) extolling the culinary excellence of the cheesecake at "Mindy's.

From opening day in 1921 to its ultimate demise in 1969, Lindy's featured the pantheon of great Jewish delicacies — corned beef, pickled herring, sturgeon and gefilte fish.

Simply put, cheesecake was the apotheosis of the New York dessert, and nobody did it better than Lindy's.

Since 1969, a mystique of sorts has grown up around the Lindy's cheesecake recipe, as though it were a piece of lost Little Old New York alongside the Third Avenue El and the tragically torn-down Penn Station.

Celebrated food writer Craig Claiborne wrote in the New York Times in 1977 about how the recipe had "disappeared off the face of the earth," but a versatile pastry chef reverse-engineered it by observing an elderly cheesecake preparer he had hired who claimed a Lindy's pedigree and refused disclosure.

In his 2002 cookbook "Baking in America," author Greg Parent printed a cheesecake recipe that he got from a House Beautiful food editor who, in turn, said she got it from Leo "Lindy" Lindemann, the maestro who kept Lindy's humming from Day One until just before his death in 1957.