Cheesecake and Jews

Pentecost, the holiday we Jews call Shavuot, is here. As a Rebbetzin, one would expect that I would be very busy with loads of activity. After all, Shavuot is one of the three Jewish festivals termed ‘foot festivals’. In ancient Israel, while the Temple stood in Jerusalem, all Jews were expected to make the pilgrimage to the Temple on Shavuot, as they would on the festivals of Sukkot (Tabernacles) and Pesach (Passover). Yet, in our day and age, in our synagogue in Central London, Shavuot is a quiet affair, and most of our members will be elsewhere, doing other things.

^{Coloured silhouette in mixed technique with Jewish symbols, 19th century, in the collection of the Jewish Museum of Switzerland.}

Those who know a bit about the holiday will tell you it has something to do with the receiving of the Torah. The Torah is the centerpiece of Judaism, the book that holds our laws, our history, and our identity, and whose interpretation throughout the last three and a half thousand years has been the work of every generation since its receipt at Sinai.

Others will associate the festival with dairy food, particularly with cheesecake.

There are many reasons given for why we eat dairy on Shavuot. A few of my favorites are that as the Jews received the Torah on the Sabbath and learned the laws of kosher ritual slaughter of animals, they couldn’t prepare a meat meal on Shabbat. One of the many laws around kosher and Shabbat observance is that one can’t slaughter an animal on Shabbat. Thus, on that day, they could not eat meat.

Another reason is the association of dairy products with the color white, which symbolizes purity. On the day of the reception of the Torah, we were pure and holy in our reception. Before knowing what was in store for us in the Torah, we said we would observe and then we would listen; we were willing to accept the Torah before even knowing what was in it.

There are a few more reasons the sages give. But let’s look at one of the most pragmatic reasons. Many forget that Judaism has an aspect intrinsically tied to the Land of Israel. Judaism, in its fullest expression, is a religion best practiced in Israel. It is a religion tied to the seasons and the land. Though in our exile we practiced Judaism outside the Land, the holidays were always in tone with what was happening in Israel on an agricultural and seasonal level.

Shavuot is celebrated fifty days after Passover. Passover needs to be in the spring, and our yearly calendar is adapted to ensure that Passover will always be in the spring. You might think that should be easy, but it actually isn’t. Consider this: the earth orbits around the sun every year. That revolution takes 365 days, 6 hours, and 9 minutes. Because 6 hours and 9 minutes is an awkward time frame, our years are 365 days, and every fourth year, according to the Gregorian (solar) calendar, we add a day to make up the difference and to ensure that our months, which we think of seasonally, stay in ‘place’. This means that December and Christmas will always be in the winter. On the other hand, Jewish months are lunar months. The moon orbits the earth, and though the orbit is 27 and a half days, it takes 29 and a half days to change from new moon to new moon. The lunar year of twelve months is therefore 354 days. This explains why Muslims, who also keep a lunar calendar but don’t have a leap year, celebrate Ramadan every year 11 days earlier than the previous year. Jews, however, follow a “luni-solar” year and adjust our calendar by adding a leap month 7 times every 19 years, just before the celebration of Purim. Our calendar is incredibly standardized. Purim is always four weeks before Passover, Passover is always at the beginning of spring, and Shavuot, even according to the Bible, isn’t on a specific date but rather, as we said above, fifty days after Passover.

Every one of these calendar adjustments in the Torah is connected to agriculture. Passover and the beginning of spring were not just celebrating our exodus from Egypt but also the start of the barley harvest, the first harvest of Israel’s annual agricultural cycle. Shavuot was the beginning of the wheat harvest. Another name for the festival of Shavuot is ‘Chag HaBikkurim’ or “festival of First Fruits”. In Exodus 23:16, the holiday of Shavuot is called the “Feast of Harvest, the first-fruits of thy labors (Heb. “bikkurei ma’asecha”)”.

Just as we know that fruits and vegetables have a season, in our day and age it’s hard to realize that grain and dairy have seasons as well. Before industrial farming, calving seasons were traditionally in the spring (today farmers choose calving seasons based on market needs), and thus, as calves were born, their mothers produced an abundance of milk. To ensure that the milk didn’t go to waste, farmers and housewives used the abundance of milk to create a multitude of dairy products; be they cream, butter, buttermilk, curd, or soft cheeses — anything that would help the milk last longer.

Curd and soft cheeses were often baked into cakes. The first cheesecakes we know of were made by the Greeks, and the Jews of Israel, who were greatly impacted by the spread of Hellenism, would have learned to make cheesecake from them.

Cheesecake thus seems like just another way to make use of an abundance of milk. How then does it go from the ‘waste not, want not’ category of foods to the luxuriousness of today? I believe it was the Americanization of the thing. Cheesecake was brought to America with the wave of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who came starting in 1881. American farmers and dairy producers are the ones who used cream instead of milk in making their soft cheese, creating a far creamier and solid texture than the European soft cheeses. On top of that, the quality of the dairy itself was better. It was Jewish housewives who utilized this heavier, creamier cheese in their cheesecakes. The result was a cheesecake so unlike its European predecessor — it was smooth, silky in texture, and celebratory in every way.

^{The Yiddish read: Now recommended for adult and children, makes strong bodies, good marks, clean, pasteurized in blue and silver packages}

In New York, especially in the Lower East Side of Manhattan where a high concentration of Jews lived, home bakers created these dense and rich cheesecakes. Initially, as they had in Europe, they placed the cheesy filling on a pastry base. In Junior’s in Brooklyn, their famed cheesecake rests on a sponge cake base. Eventually, the base of choice was crushed-up cookies, particularly graham crackers. The crumbs were just sweet enough and, when mixed with melted butter, created a base that held up well to the heavy filling and saved housewives the extra step of baking pastry.

How did Jewish New York cheesecake become a household treat across America? In 1935, Charles Lubin and his brother-in-law, Arthur Gordon, bought a chain of three bakeries in Chicago and expanded to seven bakeries. In 1956, Charles Lubin named the bakeries’ famed cheesecake after his eight-year-old daughter, Sara Lee. In the 1980s, when the then-renamed Sara Lee Bakeries went into the mail-order business, their top product was frozen cheesecake. For the first time, Americans could buy a rich, creamy Jewish cheesecake from supermarkets around the country.

But how then did it become so closely associated with Shavuot? The best idea I can come up with is that cheesecake, at the very least a New York style cheesecake made with blocks of cream cheese, is decidedly not an everyday cake. It’s lovely to know that even today, in our era of mass consumerism, there is a foodstuff that remains a luxury and yet is attainable for many. It’s not the cost alone that makes it luxurious, but the mouth-feel as well — and let us not forget the calories! Everything about the New York style cheesecake is luxurious. Therefore, it is saved for special occasions. In our Jewish calendar, it is Shavuot. We celebrate the Torah and the holiday’s connection to dairy foods with a dairy feast, featuring cheese blintzes in the Ashkenazi kitchen, and cheese sambusaks and burekas in the Sephardi one, and we end the meal with cheesecake.

Daniel and I have found that people who celebrate Shavuot are usually those who are, in general, more stringently observant of Jewish customs. We want to find ways to encourage more people to learn about the holiday and celebrate it in some way. This is the moment in our history that we received the Torah. While very observant Jews will stay up all night to learn Torah, others will attend services. The easiest and most delicious way to celebrate the holiday is simply by having a slice of cheesecake.

My ultimate Shavuot dairy feast:

Because we rarely, if ever, serve guests dairy on Shabbat, when Shavuot comes around and I pull out all the stops, and every one of my favourite dairy recipes all in one go, of course it is over the top.

But I just can’t help myself!