Cheesecake

Cheesecake dates back to ancient Greece, and evolved into the modern form around the 18th century. There are many regional variations of cheesecake.

Vanilla, spices, lemon, chocolate, pumpkin, or other flavors may be added to the main cheese layer. Additional flavors and visual appeal may be added by topping the finished dessert with fruit, whipped cream, nuts, cookies, fruit sauce, chocolate syrup, or other ingredients.

History

Early cheesecakes

Ancient Greece

Although its exact origin is uncertain, cheesecake is reputed to have originated in Ancient Greece, where cakes containing cheese were served to athletes in the first Olympic Games in 776 BC. Athenaeus lists a wide range of cheese-filled cakes in the Deipnosophists. He also reports that Callimachus, in his List of Various Books, mentions four now-lost treaties on the Art of Making Cheesecakes, written by Aegimius, Hegesippus, Metrobius, and Phaetus.

The Ancient Greeks enjoyed plakous, a layered cake first mentioned about 350 BCE by two Greek poets. According to the gastronomic poet Archestratos, plakous was a popular delicacy served at the end of the meal alongside dried fruits and nuts, and praises that the cake was made in Athens for being soaked in Attic honey from Mount Hymettos. His contemporary, the comic poet Antiphanes, notes the other two main ingredients, goat cheese and wheat flour. Two centuries later, in Italy, Cato the Elder gives an extant recipe for placenta, the same name translated into Latin.

Ancient Greek religious rituals often offered cakes to Greek gods as a non-violent alternative to animal sacrifice. Surviving historical records have preserved the names of several offertory cakes, though specific recipes remain scarce. Notably, the amphiphon was a cheesecake, decorated with lighted candles, offered to Artemis during the full moon of the month of Mounychion. Another cheese-based offertory cake included the phthoeis, also called selene ("moon"), which was round, white, and filled with cheese, wheat flour, and honey. Romans also offered cakes to their deities, including placenta and savillum. The most prevalent of these sacrificial cakes was the libum, for which Cato documented its recipe in his On Agriculture consisting of cheese, flour (wheat or durum), and an egg. which were all mixed, shaped into a large cake, and baked over bay leaves.

England

Cheesecakes made with soft cheese were recorded in England as early as 1265, when the account books of the Countess of Leicester listed "cheese for tarts". However, the earliest recipe that has been found didn't appear until 1390, in the first English cookbook Forme of Cury, featuring a baked pastry shell called Tart de Bry filled with cheese, egg yolks, sugar, salt, ginger, and saffron. Another similar recipe included nessh (a soft, fresh curd cheese), whole eggs and butter, but no saffron or ginger. A more modern recipe from the cookbook is Sambocade, which involves lining a baking dish with pastry crust, mixing strained and dried cheese curds with breadcrumbs, sugar, eggs, and elderflower, then drizzling rosewater over the cheesecake after being completely baked. On this basis, the English chef Heston Blumenthal argues that cheesecake is an English invention. Because the recipe does not specify an amount of sugar and due to the ingredient's rarity in 14th century England, the food historian Janet Clarkson gives a different perspective, writing "it seems reasonable to assume" that sambocade would be closer to the modern quiche than cheesecake.

Hannah Wolley gives a more modern cheesecake recipe in her Queenlike Closet in 1664, which includes currants and rose water:

Take four gallons of new milk, set it with a little runnet, and when it is come, break it gently, and whey it very well, then take some manchet, first scalded well in new milk, let the milk be thick with it, and while it is hot, put in a quarter of a pound of fresh butter, and stir it in, when it is cold, mix that and your curd together very well, then put in one pound and half of plumped currans, some beaten spice, a very little salt, rosewater, and the yolks of eight eggs, half a pint of cream, and a little sugar, mix them well together, then make some paste, with flower, butter, the yolk of an egg and fair water, and roul it out thin, and so bake them in bake-pans, and do not let them stand too long in the oven.

Cheese tarts were regarded as luxury foods and were popular at medieval summers feasts and fairs.

The English name cheesecake emerged in the 15th century, and the cheesecake did not evolve into its modern form until somewhere around the 18th century. In the early 17th century, foods known as cheesecakes typically had cheese curds, eggs and spices as their base. The food historian C. Anne Wilson describes these as "spiced cheese tarts". By the middle of the century, some recipes for these had lost their cheese altogether, including a mixture of eggs, clotted cream, flour and butter as a filling. Around the late 17th century the lemon cheesecake was created, and then the orange cheesecake. These were filled with fruit curd, and lacked cheese altogether. Dishes made under the name cheesecake without cheese continued into the 18th century. In the spring, as demand among calves for milk was greatest and the supply of curds was at its lowest, some cooks substituted dairy for ground rice and almond meal.

Around the 18th century, Europeans began removing yeast and adding beaten eggs to the cheesecake instead. With the overpowering yeast flavor gone, the result tasted more like a dessert treat. The early 19th-century cheesecake recipes in A New System of Domestic Cookery by Maria Rundell are made with cheese curd and fresh butter. One version is thickened with blanched almonds, eggs, and cream, and the cakes may have included currants, brandy, raisin wine, nutmeg, and orange flower water.

Modern cheesecakes

Modern commercial American cream cheese was developed in 1872, when William Lawrence, from Chester, New York, was searching for a way to recreate the soft, French cheese Neufchâtel. He discovered a way of making an "unripened cheese" that is heavier and creamier; other dairymen came up with similar creations independently.

Modern cheesecake comes in two different types. Along with the baked cheesecake, some cheesecakes are made with uncooked cream cheese on a crumbled-cookie or graham cracker base. This type of cheesecake was invented in the United States.