About Cheesecakes

Cakes and tarts baked with cheese are among the oldest of all baked goods, found wherever milk was transformed into simple, fresh-curd cheeses. In Roman times, sheep or goat cheeses were baked in cake-like breads. Other early forms of cheesecake, including one called scriblita, mentioned by the comic playwright Plautus, were fried in small cakes or baked on a hearth.

The oldest recorded cheesecake may be the libum, a flat cake or pie described by Cato in a Roman manuscript, De Re Rustica. “Crush two pounds of cheese,” he begins, “mix with it a pound of rye flour, or, in order to render it lighter, throw in merely half a pound of wheat flour and an egg. Stir, mix, and work this paste; form of it a cake which you will place on leaves, and cook in a tart dish on the hot hearth.”