Jewish Invention Myths: The Cheesecake
It has been a while since I cover a ‘jewish invention’ myth related to food with my last one by the nonsense claim that jews invented the British national dish: Fish and Chips. (1)
However, a common one foodstuff which is cited to have been jewish in origin is cheesecake and Kathyrn Bernheimer at ‘Boulder Jewish News’ makes just this claim. (2)
The truth is however that is absolute nonsense since our first known reference to cheesecake is from Athenaeus of Naucratis - in Egypt - and Callimachus of Alexandria who mention that a Greek named Aegimus (possibly of Velia in southern Italy) described the art of making ‘cheesecakes’ in a book on the subject in the 5th century B.C. (3)
The first surviving cheesecake recipe we have is found in the work 1st century B.C. Roman writer Cato the Elder called ‘De Agri Cultura’ (4) that Cato referred to as called ‘Placenta’ which is pretty close if not almost identical to a modern cheesecake. (5) This allows us to reasonably deduce that cheesecake was likely a popular dish in ancient and classical Rome as it probably was also among the Greeks.
Further the English medieval cookbook called ‘The Forme of Curry’ from circa 1390 contains a cheesecake recipe under the name ‘Sambocade’. (6) Even jewish celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal agrees that this was indeed modern cheesecake but with different flavourings such as elderflower compared to most modern recipes. (7)
The term ‘cheesecake’ itself also dates from medieval England and first occurs in the fifteenth century there. (8)
So how did the idea that cheesecake was a ‘jewish invention’ come about?
Well, as Atto points out, the term ‘cheesecake’ has been used for many different dishes since its invention in fifteenth century England that are not in fact ‘cheesecake’ as we’d think of it, but the traditional curd-cheese cheesecake was reintroduced to North America by Eastern European migrants in the twentieth century. (9)
And who were many of those migrants from Eastern Europe?
Jews.
Hence the mistaken assumption likely arose that jews had ‘invented’ cheesecake because they had played a significant role in reintroducing it to the United States in the twentieth century which simply wasn’t – and isn’t – true.
References
(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/is-the-origin-of-fish-and-chips-jewish
(2) https://boulderjewishnews.org/2009/an-informal-list-of-jewish-inventions-innovations-and-radical-ideas/
(3) Darra Goldstein (Ed.), 2015, ‘The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets’, 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, p. 32
(4) Cato the Elder, De Agri Cultura, 75-76; this is available here: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/cato/de_agricultura/e*.html
(5) http://www.culinaryschools.com/newsletter/July%202007%20CulinarySchools.com%20Newsletter.pdf
(6) Carol Wilson, 2002, ‘Cheesecakes, Junkets, and Syllabubs’, Gastronomica, Vol. 2, No. 4, p. 19
(7) Heston Blumenthal, 2013, ‘Historic Heston’, 1st Edition, Bloomsbury: London, p. 35
(8) John Atto, 2002, ‘An A-Z of Food and Drink’, 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, p. 68
(9) Ibid.