Back in 2010, Winnipeg food blogger Margaret Ullrich posted an unknowingly controversial piece. The seemingly sweet subject was cheesecake. More specifically, Ullrich wrote about a day she spent in the pages of a “Sopranos” themed cookbook, making a recipe dubbed Carmella’s Cheesecake for the mafioso matriarch. While Tony and the brood are quintessentially Garden State, New York-born Ullrich took the opportunity to write about her love of the classic Big Apple-style cheesecake. She went on to explain in delicious detail why it was a cut above her new Prairie home’s take on the cake. “I mentioned the Co-Op Refrigerator Cheesecake recipe and I was a bit snarky about it,” she recounted. “I’m from New York and the cheesecakes there, well, they’re thick enough to stop a bullet, while the Co-Op Refrigerator Cheesecake has gelatin in it.” The recipe’s use of crushed pineapples and heavy cream struck a similarly sour note with the Yankee-turned-Manitoban. “I tried to fit in, be a real Winnipegger, but really. I couldn’t believe it,” she wrote. Needless to say, she got a few emails from her Manitoba readers, incensed to hear the enduring Co-Op recipe, gelatinous as the day is long, was being dragged through the proverbial, crushed graham cracker mud. After all, baked into the decades old dish is a slab of Manitoba history as rich as the four cups of very specific cream cheese it calls for. Sweet success in the North End The cheesecake recipe in question first appeared on the sides of countless tubs of cream cheese made by the People’s Co-Operative Limited. According to historian Jim Mochoruk, co-author of “The People’s Co-Op: The Life and Times of a North End Institution,” the organization was initially founded in 1928 by Winnipeg’s left wing Ukrainian community as the Workers and Farmers Co-Operative Association. “They thought that by launching some cooperative ventures, that they’d reach out to more people, and so they started out with this fuel yards,” Mochoruk explained. “It was an incredibly shoestring operation. They chose it because it was sort of low capital investment to get going, and they built up a clientele.” The co-op’s initial customers for their coal, fuel and wood were mainly Ukrainian immigrants and some Jewish Winnipeggers who had settled in the North End. Against all odds, the business became a runaway success even as the country lurched into the economic devastation of the Great Depression. In the ‘30s, the co-op’s powers that be decided to rebrand and expand into the dairy business under the new name the People’s Co-Operative Limited. They retrofitted an old bakery into a dairy and creamery and partnered up with Ukrainian dairy farmers who wanted to get their products pasteurized. It was their way of getting ahead of the curve, Mochoruk explained, as they correctly predicted pasteurization would soon become government mandated. Soon, People’s Co-Op milk, butter and cream were being delivered to doorsteps in other immigrant-dense areas like the West End and St. Boniface. Delivery men were matched to their ethnocentric routes based on what languages they spoke, be it Yiddish, French or German. But it was Swiss immigrant and dairy plant superintendent John Crawl who cooked up the recipe for the co-op’s most iconic product – cream cheese. Bricks of it were packaged in wax with whey from the cheese making process poured on top. The Swiss specialty quickly became a new Canadian classic. “The cream cheese was remarkably successful as a product,” Mochoruk said. “They were sending Co-Op cream cheese all across the country. There were restaurants and bakeries all throughout, especially Western Canada, but even in Toronto and Montreal, that would order Co-Op cream cheese and it would actually be flown out to them.” Eventually, People’s Co-Op began printing dairy-dense recipes on the sides of its products, like Buttermilk Flapjacks on its heavy cream and, you guessed it, the Refrigerator Cheesecake recipe that combines Co-Op cream cheese alongside milk, egg yolks and, yes, gelatin. “They were basic recipes, but people loved them,” Mochoruk said. “My mom used to get the Co-Op cream cheese and would always make their refrigerator cheesecakes.” ‘The Winnipeg icon that it is’ While the recipe was given a few revisions over the years, the chilled confection continued to be warmly embraced through countless decades, recipe swaps and bake sales, even as People’s Co-Op disbanded in the ‘90s, unable to compete after milk pricing legislation was lifted. “The market conditions were just way too difficult. It was impossible to fight these the big national companies,” Mochoruk said. Still, the Refrigerator Cheesecake recipe has been immortalized in countless food blogs and Reddit posts by Manitobans hungry to track down the exact recipe they had so loved in years past. Due to the passionate response to her post in 2010 about the recipe, Ullrich went back for seconds. “I posted the recipe for the Co-Op cheesecake and along with a few apologies for not respecting it as the Winnipeg icon that it is,” Ullrich said. “The recipe is a nice light dessert, and it’s good for in the summer because you don’t need to use an oven.” For Prairie-raised Mochoruk, who grew up drinking People’s Co-Op milk, whose father and uncles worked for the company, who even did a stint himself with the North End institution to pay for grad school, it’s quite clear why Manitobans continue to hunger for a taste of the past. “It’s a form of nostalgia, right? Many of us can remember seeing the old Co-Op delivery trucks. Everything from our youth tastes better.”
