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Hello, family, and welcome to Issue 6.
I met Gunjan Sud when we worked together doing police reform for the City of Chicago. Years later, we still talk frequently and support each other through the highs and lows of founder life.
As I was bouncing ideas off her one day, she shared in passing that her husband once made a gulab jamun cheesecake for her late father.
My ears perked. The idea of gulab jamun in a cheesecake intrigued me, but what struck me most was the fondness with which Gunjan recounted the memory. I reached out to Gunjan’s husband, Ram, to learn more. I’m sharing his account with you today in a short vignette.
For me, Ram’s story is a sweet reminder that effort is its own love language — and sometimes the one that matters most.
Happy Father’s Day to all the dads and caretakers. Hope you enjoy.
Ram Narayan set out to peel a pile of pistachios.
See, Ram wanted to make a pistachio cake for his mother-in-law, and he’d read somewhere that if you peel the pistachios first, the cake will turn green.
So imagine peeling, one by one, the thin, papery testa off cups-full of soaked pistachios for some six hours! while your mother-in-law watches — all with the intention of baking for her, from scratch, the perfect saffron pistachio cake.
Ram explained that Gunjan’s family loves dessert.
“My family wasn’t really a sweet family growing up,” he told me. “But for her family, the sweets are like, the end-all, be-all. They can’t end a meal without a proper dessert.”
This was particularly true for Gunjan’s late father. His favorite was gulab jamun, the small fried dough balls popular across South Asia. They’re made from a base of milk solids and soaked in sugar syrup, sometimes scented with rose water, cardamom, or other fragrant aromatics.
A few years ago, Ram decided to learn how to bake. To make Gunjan’s dad a cheesecake. An eggless, gulab jamun cheesecake, with a cookie crust made from crushed-up Parle-G.
“I’d never made a cheesecake before.”
The magic was in the details.
The cake had to be egg-free, so Ram played around with other binders, like cornstarch, until he found what worked. His pressure cooker wasn’t big enough for a cheesecake pan, so he baked the cake in a water bath. He halved the gulab jamun to line, artfully, the edges of each slice. He made the crust from Parle-G, the “quintessential Indian cookie,” which Ram also described unsentimentally as the “worser form of Biscoff.”
“I cut it open and showed him the slice and told him what it was,” Ram recalled about the moment of truth — when he presented his creation to Gunjan’s dad on Father’s Day about five years ago. Ram explained:
You could tell he couldn’t even fathom that was like a thing that existed. So he was super excited. Then he started smashing it.
I mean, if you gave it to somebody who actually knew cheesecakes, it probably wouldn’t be that great. But her family not only is into sweets, but they’re just super nice about everything. So he loved it, and was raving about it, and I think they ate it within a week or something.
Gunjan’s father passed away not long after. The family continues to honor his memory — and sweet tooth — through other Indian-inspired cheesecake experiments, like Ram’s saffron pistachio cheesecake.
It didn’t turn green, in case you were still wondering :)
If you’re eager to experiment after reading this story, here’s a head start: the Eggless Gulab Jamun Cheesecake recipe that was the inspo for Ram’s.
Never Precious is curated and published by Tyeesha Dixon.
How sweet it is to read about this bringing back those memories of Indian restaurant in Boston Cambridge. We ate and drank chai tea plentiful and bill was humble unlike these days everything seems…. Thank you and your friends for sharing and honoring our cultures to family values. Love y’all🫶🏼