Cheesecake is reputed to have fed athletes at the first Olympics
Cakes made with cheese were reportedly served at the first Olympic Games in 776 BC, and ancient Greek writers produced whole treatises, now lost, on the art of making them. The dessert later passed through medieval English tarts and Hannah Wolley's rosewater recipe before an American dairyman's cream cheese reshaped it.
The Greeks enjoyed plakous, a layered cake of goat cheese and wheat flour first mentioned around 350 BCE; the poet Archestratos praised Athenian versions soaked in honey from Mount Hymettos. Two centuries later Cato the Elder recorded a Latin recipe under the name placenta. Cheese cakes also served as offerings to the gods in place of animal sacrifice: one, decorated with lit candles, went to Artemis at the full moon, and another round white cake was simply called selene, the moon. Athenaeus mentions four lost books on cheesecake making.
England's account books note cheese for tarts in 1265, and the country's first cookbook, Forme of Cury from 1390, gives a Tart de Bry filled with cheese, egg yolks, sugar, ginger and saffron. The English name cheesecake appeared in the 15th century, and cheese tarts were treated as luxuries at summer fairs. Hannah Wolley's Queen-like Closet of 1664 adds currants and rose water. In the 18th century cooks swapped yeast for beaten eggs, which made the result taste more like a sweet dessert.
In 1872 William Lawrence of Chester, New York, trying to copy the French cheese Neufchâtel, hit on a heavier, creamier unripened cheese, the ancestor of modern cream cheese. The unbaked style set on a crumbled biscuit or graham cracker base is an American invention. Whether cheesecake is really a cake is argued: with eggs as the only leavening, some call it a torte, while others point to its separate crust, soft filling and lack of flour as signs of a custard pie.
Regional versions multiply. Japanese cotton cheesecake wobbles like chiffon, the Philippines favours purple ube cheesecake, and Poland's sernik uses twaróg quark and dates to the 17th century. The crustless burnt Basque cheesecake, created in 1990 by Santiago Rivera at La Viña, spread online in the 2010s with help from Nigella Lawson. A Northern Ireland survey found an average restaurant slice held the equivalent of 5.5 sugar cubes.
Source: Cheesecake
