- Hoo, hoo, hoo.
I'm so nervous.
I've never done this at home
without the supervision of a television show.
Hello, I'm Hannah Hart, and welcome to "Edible History,"
the show that helps you time travel with your taste buds.
Growing up, I saw cheesecake
as maybe the fanciest of desserts.
New York cheesecake?
You're telling me they fly this stuff around the world,
all from New York?
Of course, now I know that not all cheesecake
comes from New York.
But it has me wondering, where did it come from?
To find out, I'm chatting with Cathy Kaufman,
the president of the Culinary Historians of New York.
Where would you say that what we consider the cheesecake
started from?
- It is very much a Mediterranean/European sort of dish
because most other cultures
didn't depend on dairy that much.
- What inspired the recipes that later became cheesecake?
- It's the original cheesecake recipes
that were written by Cato the Elder
in the mid-second century BCE.
Cato was a Roman senator.
His famous line at every Senate meeting
was "Carthage must be destroyed"
because he was a real hawk, but anyway,
he wrote this book called "On Farming."
There are some fabulous recipes,
and lot of what those recipes involve
are ways of using fresh cheese.
- Did it ever have any roots in nobility or being fancy?
- The cheesecake, from what we can tell, was a dessert
that was gonna appeal to the well-to-do folks.
- So I'm gonna be trying to make one of Cato's recipes.
But I can't pronounce it.
It's salamama?
- Uh, savillum.
- Savillum?
- It is very much like what we think of
as a modern cheesecake.
- Maybe this will make me fall back in love with cheesecake.
I mean, we'll see.
The first thing a cheesecake needs is cheese.
Making cheese is incredibly simple.
Basically, you need two ingredients, milk, an acid,
which in this case is lemon juice, and a heat source.
We simmer the milk, we add an acid, and that's it.
You know, it really fascinates me that someone
way back in the day thought,
I'm gonna take a lemon and add it to milk.
Who would want that?
All right, how's this doing?
Oh, yep, that's curdled milk.
So the way we turn curdled milk into cheese
is actually pretty easy.
Wow.
So we've got our curds and whey all mixed together,
but when we use our cheesecloth and give it a little squeeze
we end up with some cheese.
And now it's time to move on to the rest of the cheesecake.
Our next step is to flavor our ricotta with honey.
But not just any honey.
We actually were able to get honey from Attica.
Oh.
Delicious.
Now it's time to see how this cheese turned out.
Oh.
Very cool.
Very, very cool.
This looks fantastic.
Okay, so we're gonna put it in our big bowl.
And now we're gonna blend it
with about a half a pound of flour.
Dee dee dee dee dee, dee dee dee, dee dee dee dee dee.
One egg.
Hard egg.
It sounds good.
And last but not least, our beautiful, beautiful honey.
I mean, who wouldn't want to just stick this in their mouth?
Just a couple hearty swizzles.
Whoa.
I feel like Winnie the Pooh.
And guess what?
That's the last of our ingredients.
This is the savillum.
All right, now we need to prepare our dish for baking.
So we're gonna take a little, beautiful olive oil
and grease this puppy up.
Hmm.
Think about your farm, your future farm,
your gentleman's farm, the farm you have
when the life of entertainment is over,
and it's time to just retire,
maybe take up woodworking, maybe raise some sheep.
You could probably knit.
It'll be great.
I have so many cats.
Let's add a couple spoonfuls.
Evenly distribute your batter.
It's kind of like having a Zen garden, you know,
where you just move the sand around.
It's very relaxing.
I want to make savillum all the time.
Okay, now it's time to bake.
This thing is pretty dense, so you want to make sure
that the center is cooked thoroughly.
As Cato says, "for it is deepest there."
So, cover it with a lid.
Check on it when it's about 90%.
And that's it.
Did somebody say "savillum?"
here it is.
Oh, yeah.
I am, for one, very excited.
So you can see that the edge has a nice dark ring,
so we know for sure it's cooked all the way there.
Let's see if it jiggles at all.
Oh no.
Oh, that's cooked.
That's cooked all the way through.
Perfect.
If Cato could see me now.
Next, we're gonna do a layer of honey on top.
Ah, let's get a little more.
Oh, gorgeous.
You want to make sure your honey distributes
as evenly as possible.
And this stuff is so thick and so viscous,
it's not really gonna spread.
So you gotta kind of just encourage it.
Now that your honey is pretty evenly dispersed,
we're gonna give it a hearty sprinkle of poppy seeds.
And then we just cover it up and stick it back in the oven.
Here we go.
I gotta say, this thing...
Oh, it smells delicious.
Oh, wow.
I'm feeling super proud.
This looks great.
I can't wait to eat it in a couple hours
'cause it's gotta cool.
(ticking)
And that's pretty much all I can wait.
And Cato even went so far as to say,
"Serve in the dish, and eat it with a spoon."
Here we go.
Oh.
Okay.
Well, it smells great.
Mmm.
If bread pudding and cheesecake had a delicious baby,
it would be savillum.
I'm still on the fence about cheesecake,
but I can say that I do in fact like its ancestor, savillum.
And it might make a great party dish, you know?
Pour it into a bunch of little ramekins.
Hand it to people.
Say, "Oh, this is from Ancient Rome.
"What? Who me? How did I know that? I don't know.
"I watched a new amazing show called 'Edible History.'
"You're welcome."