susanne,

scraped vanilla beans/pods meaning you have to split the vanilla beans open and scrape the little black seeds off. those little black seeds are fabulous. personally, i prefer them to the vanilla essence...

so when your recipe calls for 1/2 scraped vanilla bean, just cut the bean/pod in half and scrape the black seeds out to add in your cheesecake. (discard the outer part and reserve the otehr 1/2 in an air0tight container of course!!!) i think this must be a wonderful cake coz it uses the real vanilla beans. care to share the recipe with us?