Cheesecake

• 1. Introduction

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  Cheesecake already had its own book in the 5th century BCE, when a Greek physician named Aegimus wrote a treatise on the art of making it. That is the earliest mention of the dessert anyone has found. The dish he described had little in common with a modern slice, yet the idea has barely changed. Take a soft fresh cheese, such as cottage cheese, cream cheese, mascarpone, quark or ricotta. Beat in eggs and sugar. Sometimes add a base of crushed cookies, graham crackers, pastry or sponge. Flavor it with vanilla, lemon, chocolate or pumpkin, then crown it with fruit, whipped cream or nuts. It may be baked or left unbaked, and it is usually served chilled. This documentary follows the dessert across more than two thousand years. How did a ritual offering become a supermarket staple? Why do cooks still disagree about what kind of food it is? And what happens when one regional version spreads faster than the kitchens that invented it?

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• 2. Ancient Recipes

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  Cato the Elder's De Agri Cultura holds the oldest cheesecake recipes that survive. It gives three cakes meant for religious uses, called libum, savillum and placenta. Of the three, placenta comes closest to the modern dessert, because its crust is prepared and baked separately. Scholars think a cheesecake of some kind was already popular in Greece before the Romans conquered it and took the dish for themselves.

  In 1390, an English cookbook called Forme of Cury recorded a later relative named sambocade, flavored with elderflower and rose water. The English chef Heston Blumenthal points to that recipe when he argues that cheesecake is really an English invention. The English word itself has been in use only since the 15th century.

  Around the 18th century, European cooks changed the recipe at its core. They stopped using yeast and began beating eggs into the cheese instead. Without the heavy yeast flavor, the result tasted more like a treat than a bread. Early in the 19th century, Maria Rundell's A New System of Domestic Cookery gave recipes built on cheese curd and fresh butter. One version was thickened with blanched almonds, eggs and cream. Cooks could add currants, brandy, raisin wine, nutmeg and orange flower water.

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• 3. Cream Cheese Arrives

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  William Lawrence, a dairyman from Chester, New York, was trying to copy the soft French cheese Neufchâtel in 1872. He ended up with something heavier and creamier, which he described as an unripened cheese. Other dairymen reached similar results on their own. That cheese gave cheesecake a second branch. Alongside the baked kind, American cooks began mixing uncooked cream cheese onto a base of crumbled cookies or graham crackers. This unbaked type was invented in the United States.

  Chicago-style cheesecake is baked, firm at the edge and soft and creamy in the middle. It is often made in a greased cake pan, and its crust is usually crushed shortbread mixed with sugar and butter. Some frozen cheesecakes follow this style.

  New York-style cheesecake, also called Jewish-style, has a more crowded origin story. The food historian Gil Marks traces it to Ashkenazi Jewish cooks in the 1930s. It became famous through places such as Reuben's Restaurant and Lindy's, a kosher-style deli opened in 1921 by the German-Jewish immigrant Leo Lindermann. Earlier cheese pies had called for cottage cheese. Arnold Reuben, the owner of Reuben's, said cream cheese entered American Jewish cooking by 1929. He claimed credit for the recipe, and for the Reuben sandwich too. He is said to have won an award at the 1929 World's Fair in Barcelona. Harry Rosen later founded Junior's in 1950, another Jewish establishment known for the style.

  The mass market came from Illinois. Charles W. Lubin, a Jewish baker in Decatur, created the Sara Lee brand of supermarket cheesecakes. He then added other cakes, including coffee cake, and the brand was selling in 48 states.

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• 4. Not Quite a Cake

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  Boston cream pie is not a pie, and cheesecake has a similar problem with its name. Some people call it a torte, because its many eggs are the only thing that makes it rise. Others see a custard pie, pointing to the separate crust, the soft filling and the absence of flour. Still other sources file it under flan or tart.

  Some versions leave dessert behind altogether. In German-speaking Switzerland, small cheesecake tartlets called Chäschüechli are savory rather than sweet. French-speaking parts of the country call them ramequin.

  Smoked salmon cheesecake is another savory form, usually served as an appetizer or on a buffet. A smoked salmon cheesecake won a prize in 1996 in the Prize Tested Recipe Contest run by Better Homes and Gardens. Its filling used Swiss cheese alongside ricotta, the more usual cheesecake cheese.

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• 5. Regional Kitchens

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  In South Africa, a popular unbaked cheesecake combines whipped cream, cream cheese and gelatin over a buttered digestive biscuit crust. Some cooks add Amarula liqueur. It closely resembles the British version and is more common in British South African communities.

  Japanese cheesecake, sometimes called soufflé-style or cotton cheesecake, is made from cream cheese, butter, sugar and eggs. Its wobbly, airy texture is similar to chiffon cake. The unbaked kind is known in Japan as rare cheesecake, written レアチーズケーキ.

  The Philippines has ube cheesecake, which sits a cream cheese layer and ube halaya on a crushed graham cracker base. Ube halaya is mashed purple yam cooked with milk, sugar and butter. Like other ube desserts in the country, the cheesecake is purple.

  Italy offers crostata di ricotta, a baked cheesecake of ricotta, chocolate chips and eggs. Ricotta also fills cassata Siciliana and pastiera Napoletana. In East Slavic cooking, the cottage cheese dish zapekanka plays a similar role.

  Poland's sernik takes its name from ser, the word for cheese, and dates back to the 17th century. It uses twaróg, a traditional Polish quark, and leans on eggs and butter rather than cream or sour cream. Sernik krakowski, from Kraków, carries a lattice crust on top. Królewski, the royal version, has cocoa crust above and below the filling. Wiedeński, the Vienna-style, has no crust at all.

  Germany's Russischer Zupfkuchen is a baked cheesecake with a cocoa crust on the base and edge. Pieces of chocolate dough are scattered over the filling before it goes into the oven.

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• 6. The Weight of a Slice

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  A nutritional survey in Northern Ireland looked at cheesecake served in restaurants and hotels. Portions turned out to be large, and the bigger servings carried more sugar, fat, saturated fat, energy and salt. The average serving was estimated to hold the sugar equivalent of 5.5 cubes. It also supplied 10% of the maximum guideline daily amount of salt.

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• 7. The Basque Craze

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  Santiago Rivera of the La Viña restaurant in the Basque Country, Spain, created a very different cheesecake in 1990. It is built from burnt custard and has no crust. The dessert only became a global phenomenon in the 2010s, helped by a recipe from the British food writer Nigella Lawson. Her recipe included a liquorice sauce taken from the Spanish chef Nieves Barragán Mohacho, who serves her own version that way.

  In 2021, Basque cheesecake was shared so widely on Instagram that it became ubiquitous in the UK. By 2023 the British restaurant critic Jay Rayner was complaining that London had too many of them.

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