Cheese cake and its history

Perhaps, since the man learned to roll out the dough, he invented cheese and started baking bread, and a cheese cake appeared. The first mention of it we find in the ancient Romans, who called it "libum" and brought to the temples as a sacrifice to the gods. With the invasion of the barbarians in the Western Roman Empire, the secret of cooking the pie was lost, but it was preserved in the East. Around 1000, the recipe of this Greek favorite dish crossed the borders of Byzantium and began a victorious march across Europe, reaching its northernmost borders - the UK and the Scandinavian countries.

There, the Greek "plachina" - a cheese pie made of puff pastry - underwent modifications. Nordic peoples are more fond of sand, yeast or biscuit base for baking. In the book "On the Good Kitchen and Manners" of the royal house of the Tudors, which was published in 1545, we meet a completely different culinary product with hard cheese, and not cottage cheese. Here is his recipe, which has survived to the present day from the Middle Ages.

Cheesecake or cheese cake

From a glass of wheat flour, 125 g of oil and a pinch of salt mix the dough. Add 3 tablespoons of sour cream and continue kneading until the mass stops sticking to the hands. Kolobok put in the cold for three hours and taken for filling: two glasses of grated cheese mixed with 1 tablespoon of flour. In 4 eggs, separate the yolks and whisk them with 2 cups of cream, add salt and red pepper to taste. The furnace is heated to 200 ° C. Roll the dough into a circle, slightly bending its edges into the sides. You Sprinkle on the middle of the cheese evenly. Pour it with egg-creamy mass and put in the oven for a quarter of an hour, then reduce the heat to 150 ° C and bake another 20 minutes until it is browned.

There are many recipes when cheese cake is served as an exquisite dessert. For these purposes, take 250 grams of quality home-made cheese and add it to the biscuit dough. It should turn out the consistency of sour cream. Pour it into the mold and press into it grapes without pits (sort of kishmish). Bake the product for half an hour at a temperature of 180 ° C.

Human fantasy knows no limits. Today, the cheese cake is made sweet and sour, kneaded on a sand, biscuit, puff pastry and even on grated cookies. Put a tender sweet curd, salted cheese, feta, "Adyghe", goat, sheep, vurdu (from colostrum, "first milk"), Parmesan, hard yellow varieties. The traditional Greek (now also Bulgarian) placinth remained in fashion, when cheese is not put on top, but between layered layers or inside the "envelope".

Let's get acquainted with the most original recipe - cheese cake with white chocolate and cherry. 200 g cookies are ground to crumbs in a coffee grinder. Then, in the same way, grind 50 g of almonds. 100 g of butter is melted to liquid state and watered with biscuits and almonds, rolled out dough and laid in a round shape, covering it with parchment paper. On the steam bath, a white chocolate bar is melted. In it add a pound of fresh cottage cheese, a glass of sugar and sour cream, a bag of vanilla sugar and four beaten eggs. Pour this stuffing onto the dough and bake the hour at 200 ° C. Then, when the pie is completely cool, prepare the cherry jelly (you can buy powder and follow the instructions on the packaging). You need to pour the jelly on the product, decorate with cocktail cherries and put the cake in the fridge for the night.