First, you must eat it as a ravenous child, in memorable twilights, before the lighting of the week-day lamp.

Then you must have yourself removed from the house of your simple feast, across the oceans, to a land where your cherished pastry is unknown even by name; and where daylight and twilight, work day and fete day, for years rush by you in the unbroken tide of a strange, new, overfull life.

You must abstain from the inimitable morsel for a period of years,--I think fifteen is the magic number,--and then suddenly, one day, rub the Aladdin's lamp of memory, and have the renowned tidbit whisked upon your platter, garnished with a hundred sweet herbs of past association.
Do you think all your imported spices, all your scientific blending and manipulating, could produce so fragrant a morsel as that which I have on my tongue as I write?
Glad am I that my mother, in her assiduous imitation of everything American, has forgotten the secrets of Polotzk cookery.

At any rate, she does not practise it, and I am the richer in memories for her omissions.

Polotzk cheese cake, as I now know it, has in it the flavor of daisies and clover picked on the Vall; the sweetness of Dvina water; the richness of newly turned earth which I moulded with bare feet and hands; the ripeness of red cherries bought by the dipperful in the market place; the fragrance of all my childhood's summers.
Abstinence, as I have mentioned, is one of the essential ingredients in the phantom dish.