Perhaps, since man learned to roll out the dough, he invented cheese and began to bake bread, and a cheese pie appeared. We find the first mention of it among the ancient Romans, who called it “libum” and brought it to the temples as a sacrifice to the gods. With the invasion of the barbarians in the Western Roman Empire, the secret to making the cake was lost, but it remained in the Eastern. Around the year 1000, the recipe for this favorite dish by the Greeks crossed the borders of Byzantium and began a victorious march through Europe, reaching its northernmost borders - Great Britain and the countries of Scandinavia.
There, the Greek “plachinta” - a cheese pie made of puff pastry - has undergone modifications. Northern peoples are more fond of sand, yeast or biscuit base for baking. In the book “On Good Kitchen and Manners” of the Royal House of Tudors, which was released in 1545, we find a completely different culinary product with hard cheese and not cottage cheese. Here is his recipe, which has come down to our days from the Middle Ages.
Cheesecake or Cheesecake
From a glass of wheat flour, 125 g of butter and a pinch of salt knead the dough. Add 3 tablespoons of sour cream and continue to knead until the mass ceases to stick to the hands. The gingerbread man is put in the cold for three hours and taken for the filling: two glasses of grated cheese are mixed with 1 tablespoon of flour. 4 eggs are separated yolks and beat them with 2 glasses of cream, add salt and red pepper to taste. The furnace is heated to 200 ° C. Roll out the dough in a circle, slightly bending its edges into the sides. You
pour cheese in the middle evenly. It is poured over with egg and cream mass and put in the oven for a quarter of an hour, after which they reduce the heat to 150 ° C and bake for another 20 minutes until browned.
There are many recipes when a cheese pie is served as a gourmet dessert. For these purposes, take 250 g of quality homemade cheese and add it to the biscuit dough. It should turn out the consistency of sour cream. Pour it into a mold and squeeze seedless grapes there (sort of raisins). Bake the product for half an hour at a temperature of 180 ° C.
Human imagination knows no limits. Today cheesecake is made sweet and sour, knead on shortbread, biscuit, puff pastry and even grated cookies. They lay tender sweet cottage cheese, salted feta cheese, feta, Adyghe, goat, sheep, ghoul (from colostrum, “first milk”), parmesan, hard yellow varieties. Traditional Greek (now also Bulgarian) plachinta remained in fashion, when cheese is placed not on top, but between puff layers or inside the “envelope”.
Let's get acquainted with the most original recipe - cheese cake with white chocolate and cherry. 200 g of biscuits are ground to crumbs in a coffee grinder. Then 50 g of almonds are ground in the same way. Melt the butter until liquid and pour cookies with almonds on it, roll out the dough and put it into a round shape, covering its bottom with parchment paper. On a steam bath melt a bar of white chocolate. A pound of fresh cottage cheese, a glass of sugar and sour cream, a bag of vanilla sugar and four beaten eggs are added to it. This filling is poured onto the dough and baked for an hour at 200 ° C. Then, when the cake has completely cooled, prepare cherry jelly (you can buy a powder and follow the instructions on the package). You need to pour jelly on the product, decorate with cocktail cherries and put the cake in the refrigerator for the night.