Cheesecake is a result of culinary evolution steeped in history, custom, folklore and ceremony. With it beginnings in earliest agricultural practice, embellished upon by local resources, and enhanced by technological advancement. In a nutshell, cheesecake is the perfect embodiment of the enthusiastic human pursuit for first-class food. Today’s cheesecake recipes are very rich and generally made from cream cheese or cottage cheese, eggs, butter and sugar.
Cheesecake through the ages.
Before there was cheesecake, there was cheese which actually dates back about 9000BC, to the earliest domestication of milk producing animals. Archaeologists have recognized that cheese was familiar to the Sumerians of 4000BC, whose cuneiform tablets include mentions of cheese. The Egyptian and Chaldean artifacts as well as the Old Testament talk about cheese, honey and almonds and wine, and relate these foods with adventures. "Little cheese" was a special term of endearment among the Greeks because they were so fond of cheese that they rewarded their children with it. Anthropologists have found cheese molds dating back to 2000 BC. The Olympic athletes trained on a diet that was mostly cheese and history first records cheesecake, as being served during the first Olympic Games held in 776 B.C. Other researchers list the isle of Samos as being famous for cheesecakes, for which Athenaeus left this recipe, "Take some cheese and pound it, put in a brazen sieve and strain it, then add honey and flour made from spring wheat and heat the whole together into one mass."
It was customary to serve cheesecakes as wedding cakes from this era and at Argos it was traditional for the bride to” bring little cakes that were roasted, covered with honey, and served to the bridegroom's friends."
"Every market in Greece sold cheeses to those who could not make their own, and by the fourth century BC the popular fresh white Greek cheeses were being flavored with herbs and spices and baked into all manner of cakes and pies...The Roman Empire used cheese a great deal in cooking....Cato mentions a sauce based on salt which was used to preserve cheese and gives the recipe for a celebration wedding cake, in which the main ingredient was cheese, spiced and flavoured with grape must, fat, aniseed and bay leaves; this was also baked on top of bay leaves which impaired their agreeable aroma to the concoction....Apicus, the foremost Roman gastronome, included a very elaborate dish among his recipes, served cold, in which the cheese was blended with honey, peppermint, watermelon, vinegar and many other ingredients."
--Cheese: A Guide to the World of Cheese and Cheesemaking, Battistotti, Botazzi et al. (pages 12-14).
Cheesecake packs a sensual wallop different from anything in the natural world because it is a prepared confection for the express purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons. From Greece the Romans spread cheesecake across Europe. Hundreds of years later cheesecake recipes were brought over to America by immigrants. American dairymen, who were trying to recreate the French cheese, Neufchatel, invented cream cheese in 1872. In 1912 James L. Kraft invented pasteurized cheese, which led to the development of Philadelphia cream cheese, one of the more popular cheese used for making cheesecake today.
Curds were still incorporated in certain cooked dishes which had survived from medieval times. The spiced cheese tarts of that period were continued in tarts of curds which were still known a cheesecakes in the seventeenth century...Fresh curds formed the basis of the filling, supported by eggs, spices and sometimes currants. By the middle of the century, some cheesecake recipes contained neither cheese nor curds, but instead a rich custardy mixture of eggs, butter, flour and unrenneted cream, duly sweetened and spiced...
A further development a few decades later was the lemon cheesecake. Its filling consisted of pounded lemon peel, egg yolks, sugar and butter...Orange cheesecakes were made in similar fashion, from the skins of Seville oranges which were first boiled in two or three waters to take off their bitterness."
--Food and Drink in Britain, C. Anne Wilson (Academy Chicago: Chicago) 1991 (pages 172-173).
The earliest genuine recipe for a cheesecake was published in the 14th century book titled Forme of Cury and it wasn’t until the 17th century that rich sweet custard pies, essentially ‘cheeseless' cheesecakes began to show up in English cookbooks. A popular favorite from the deep south called Chess pie is descended from these. New York Cheesecake is an Eastern-European-style cake made from cream and pot cheeses. The first adaptations of the cake were most likely very heavy. In her memoir of growing up in the Bronx, author Kate Simon recounts the "cementlike cheesecakes" that her mother made each week. Actors and actresses patronized Lindy’s. Eventually Lindy's cheesecake became synonymous with the New York of the early 40s. Its fabled theater-district restaurant with all of the Guys & Dolls razzle-dazzle that surrounded the cheesecake, ultimately the famous recipe for Lindy's smooth cake appeared frequently in cookbooks.
Say cheese!
Even though real cheesecakes date back to antiquity, in 1835 for entertainment schoolgirls would perform deep curtseys. They called it making cheeses. By wheeling rapidly until their petticoats blew out in a circle,” then dropping down so they came to rest inflated and resembling a wheel of cheese.”
Probably the most controversial and notorious cheesecake is September Morn. "Painted by Paul Chabas in 1912, the scene reveals a pretty young woman bathing in a lake at sunrise. The modest innocence of the nude bather is both charming and appealing however; it ran into trouble with the iniquitous Anthony Comstock the following year when it was published in the United States. The entire hullabaloo over the picture eventually led to it becoming a tremendously popular print for calendars. One historian tells that it’s, “… generally believed that the owner of the gallery in whose window Comstock saw September Morn was the person who anonymously tipped Comstock off to the presence of the picture and that he did so specifically as a publicity stunt, one that was in end extremely successful.”
The term "cheesecake" used as slang was first recorded 1934 in the sense of ''photography or photographs (as in advertisements or publicity) featuring the natural curves of shapely female legs, thighs, or trunk, usually scantily clothed. “Pulp magazine would frequently publish with photographs of attractive young women on the covers. For the times these displays are relatively chaste by contemporary values and typically restricted to "leg shots" featuring women in swimsuits or relatively short skirts. Similar scenes became widespread on calendars and playing cards of the times, and the genre became known as "cheesecake.” One etymologist explains:
” (They) first arose in the depths of the 1930s Depression. Having enough food to eat was a daily worry for millions of Americans, and cheesecake, or any other fancy dessert, would have seemed an unattainable luxury to many. So it's not surprising that the young women on the covers of those risqué magazines, similarly unattainable to the average male reader, would have become known as "cheesecake."
When the US joined World War II cheesecakes adorned aircrafts as Nose Art and the beautiful Betty Grable became not only the pin up poster girl but a timeless hallmark of the era. Alberto Vargas and his Vargas Girls added more class to the femmes of American cheesecake of the 60’s and by the 70’s Cosmopolitan magazine had Burt Reynolds in minimal attire posed for a centerfold. The picture was immediately dubbed beefcake. The Bettie Page revival of the 80's and 90's brought about a revitalization of the cheesecake genre with comic art and artists taking the soft focus and romantic style of the early artists and illustrators to a sharper look, moving through realism and beyond.
Sources:
Cheesecake & New York cheesecake:
http://www.gti.net/mocolib1/kid/foodcakes.html#cheesecake
O’Neil, Molly. New York Cook Book, (Workman Publishing: New York) 1992 (p. 436-7).
Online Etymology:
http://www.etymonline.com/c4etym.htm
The Word Detective:
http://www.word-detective.com/current.html