Cheesecake: From the Ancient Greek Olympics
to a Great American Classic

By Meryle Evans

James Kane, an early 20th-century newspaper photographer with a passion for cheesecake, is remembered today, not for his pictures, but for coining a phrase. In 1912, when Kane photographed an actress whose skirts blew up in the wind he exclaimed, "Wow, that's better than cheesecake!" thus adding to our vocabulary the slang expression for a curvaceous pin-up girl.

It is an apt metaphor for a sybaritic, slightly sinful, and incredibly popular dessert. But cheesecake's glamour is due to taste and texture rather than its rounded curves and creamy ivory complexion. Rich and dense or light as a zephyr, embellished with fresh fruits or swirled with chocolate, encased in a crust that is crunchy with nuts or crumbly as a cookie, the cheesecake is a sweet for all seasons. It is a dessert that provokes arguments among aficionados over ingredients, inspires competitions to select the best, and has made the reputation of many a chef or restaurant. Indeed, in the last half-century, cheesecake has become a social phenomenon, part of our cultural culinary heritage.

Greece - the birthplace of cheesecake.

But is it a genuine all-American original? Far from it. Cheesecake dates back to ancient Greece. The Greeks believed that the mythological demi-God Aristaeus invented cheese. It was a food that had symbolic as well as nutritional significance. Cakes made with sheep or goat cheese, flour, and honey were fed to runners during the first Olympic games on Delos in 776 B.C., and they were given as rewards in Pan-Hellenic contests to the athletes who could stay awake the longest. Philosophers praised cheesecakes and in their writings, included suggestions for ingredients and recipes. Archestratus said to "go out and demand some Attic honey as that will make your cheesecake superb." But Xanthippe, the shrewish wife of Socrates, infuriated by the gift of a cheesecake from one of her husband's admirers, threw it on the ground and trampled on it for good measure.

Cheesecake is served at the first Olympic games.

The Romans expanded cheesecake horizons with elaborations on the basic formula. Libum was lightened with eggs and savillum, a "nourishing and agreeable dish," one of three recipes offered by Cato, called for a topping of pounded poppy seeds and a honey glaze. The freshly made cakes were sold daily in the market place and eaten along with hypocras, a sweetened spiced wine.

Cheesecake went underground during the Dark Ages but resurfaced by the 11th-century when it is recorded that the monks in Roquefort, France, used their distinctive, green-veined cheese to make cakes. Talmouse, a puff pastry enclosing a sweet cheese filling was a favorite in medieval France where the 14th-century chef Taillevent prepared the recipe for his patron Philip VI of Valois.

The dessert was a favorite of Ann Boleyn.

Brie cheese appears as the main ingredient in a cake recipe in the earliest surviving English cookbook, The Form of Cury, written by order of King Richard II around 1390. The instructions call for mixing egg yolks and cheese together and adding ginger, sugar, saffron, and salt. "Take a croste ynch depe in trape," the recipe continues, "bak it and serve it forth."

Cheesecake, made with fresh curds, was a favorite of Henry VIII's consort Ann Boleyn. Her recipe, passed down for hundreds of years by British royalty, includes sack, rosewater, currants, cinnamon, sugar, "and all other spices pleasing to the taste." Another English cheesecake enthusiast, Samuel Pepys, wrote of it in his journal on several occasions. He noted on August 11, 1667, that he had "some of the best cheesecakes I ever ate in my life" and two years later talked of eating an entire cheesecake with tankard of milk in his coach. By Pepys' time, recipes commonly called for rich, thick cream and the addition of ingredients such as almonds, currants, and bits of lemon and orange peel. In the late 18th-century, the cookstove began to replace the open hearth, and newly invented baking utensils, such as a round metal hoop to hold a cake's shape, simplified cake making in both in England and the American colonies.

The early settlers in the New World had brought along rennet, the enzyme needed to coagulate milk and produce cheese. Most of their cheesecake recipes, like that of Gulielma Penn, wife of the founder of the colony of Pennsylvania, begin "Take New milke from the cow, then put in a pint of new Creme, sweet, then put in a Litel Rennet to make it Cum."

It was not until 1872 in upstate New York, that a process was devised for making cream cheese commercially. That fortunate event, coinciding with the arrival of droves of immigrants from middle Europe, eventually led to the birth of that modern masterpiece of caloric excess, the New York cheesecake.

Lindy's opens its doors in 1921.

The New York cheesecake saga began in the pre-depression 20's when an enterprising delicatessen owner, Arnold Reuben, opened a restaurant on 58th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues. Famous for overstuffed sandwiches, grouchy waiters, and rich, creamy cheesecake, Ruebens became an institution. One New Yorker, traveling to Paris just after World War II, was requested by his hostess to bring two Reubens cheesecakes instead of the usual nylons and cigarettes.

Junior's in Brooklyn

Reubens and its rivals, Lindy's on Broadway, Leonard's on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Turf in Westchester, and Junior's in Brooklyn (the only one still family-owned), competed, with fluctuating results, for the title of best cheesecake in town. They all used the same basic formula: cream cheese, eggs, flour, sugar, and vanilla; sometimes grated lemon and orange peel; and sometimes graham cracker, otherwise a cookie dough crust.

Eileen's Special Cheesecake

But Al Bariatti, who baked cakes for Reubens, conceded that the "formula" was less important than the baking process. He started the cakes in a hot oven, then lowered the temperature as soon as the batter began to take color. Other cheesecake specialists prefer baking the cakes at a lower temperature in a pan of hot water-a bain marie. This is the method used by Eileen Pezzino whose Manhattan cheesecake store Eileen's Special Cheesecake has been a SoHo fixture for decades.

While the cream cheese cake may be the ne plus ultra of the genre, cakes with other kinds of cheese abound. Ricotta cheesecake, often embellished with candied fruits, is an Italian favorite, and the Russians relish paska, a molded, crustless pyramid shaped Easter specialty. In Mexico, ricotta morphs into mild, soft, cow's milk Requeson that chef/owner Richard Sandoval of Manhattan's Pampano combines with crema mexicana, a thick cream similar to crème fraîche, in a pecan-brown sugar-graham cracker crust for a south of the border cheesecake.

Many contemporary chefs are using artisinal cheeses and tinkering with all the elements-crusts, fillings, and garnishes. Chef Jody Adams and pastry chef Lynn Moulton at Boston's Rialto pair a cornmeal crust with tangy Laura Chenel goat cheese and colorful toppings like cranberry coulis sparkling under a disk of pistachio brittle.

Fresh Robiola from Lombardy is a key ingredient of the sublime signature cheesecake pastry chef Vicki Wells prepares at Manhattan's Bolo. The flaky shortbread crust, made with both rice and regular flour, and diced dried fruits (prunes, figs, apricots, cherries, and pears) is baked, then crumbled, and pressed into a ring. Wells adds a filling of Robiola and cream cheese, sugar, eggs, Oloroso sherry, apricot purée, vanilla bean, and sour cream, and bakes the cakes for seven minutes at high temperature. Before serving, she torches the top with raw sugar. A winter fruit compote, kept slightly warm on the stove, and an orange-lemon-sherry granita complete the presentation. Wells' decadently rich companion cheesecake combines a chocolate hazelnut crust, a cheese filling with praline paste and Frangelico liqueur, a piped layer of praline ganache and a thin glaze of chocolate, plated with tiny cubes of pinot noir and citrus gelée.

But whether the recipe is ancient or up to date, New York Times food critic Craig Claiborne summed it all up when he wrote, "Cheesecake is one of the greatest inventions of all time."
 

Junior's Famous No. 1 Pure Cream Cheesecake
from Welcome to Junior's!, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1999.

• see recipe
     

Meryle Evans is a food journalist and culinary historian who has written extensively about the world's cuisines for over twenty years. She was an editor of the American Heritage Cookbook, the Horizon Cookbook, and the eighteen volume Southern Heritage Cookbook Library. As a Contributing Editor at Food Arts, Meryle has covered cooking and culture from Australia to Chile, Turkey to Tunisia for the past fourteen years. She also lectures on various aspects of culinary history and was the curator of "The Confectioners Art," an exhibit at the American Craft Museum. Other food related activities include judging the James Beard and IACP cookbook awards and the Tabasco Community Cookbook Competition.