Ancient Roman Cheesecake | Savillum, a 2,000 Year Old Recipe for Cheesecake | Ancient Eats

Hello friends, welcome back to Dig In with Raven, where we are taking a deep dive into history and tasting as much as we can. And, you know, we're probably gonna learn some stuff along the way, too. This week, we're gonna be heading over to ancient Rome and creating one of my favorite childhood desserts, cheesecake. A lot of people watching this video can attest to my love of cheesecake, so I hope that the Romans deliver. I really do, I really hope they deliver because I have a lot of expectations for my cheesecake. I hold my cheesecakes to high regard, and if it doesn't turn out so well, Rome's gonna have a bad day. Luckily, with ancient Rome, we do have a lot of people who like to write about cooking, baking, farming, food in general, so we aren't really, you know, kind of grasping at straws when it comes to ancient Roman cooking. We even have cookbooks from ancient Rome, particularly Apicius, so we do have a lot of primary resources to really get into the mindset, get into the diet of ancient Romans. For our cheesecake today, we are gonna be looking at the writings of Cato the Elder, who wrote about this lovely cheesecake in his work called De Agricultura, which means On Agriculture. Cato's On Agriculture is the only surviving complete work that we have of his, and it talks mostly about farming, but in this work, he also included a lot of recipes involving cheese. And I keep pointing to my milk when I talk about cheese, but it's not cheese yet, but it will be. Cato clearly liked cheese, because he has a lot of recipes that need cheese in this work, so we are going to honor that today by making an amazing dish called sawillum, which is essentially like a sweet cake made out of cheese, a cheesecake. So first things first is we actually have to make cheese. I know I could have bought cheese, but I didn't because, I don't know, I had this idea that I was like, I'm gonna make cheese, guys, so here I am trying to make cheese for you. We don't know how it's gonna go. I've never made cheese before in my life, so please be gentle. For the recipe that Cato has, it just takes cheese, one egg, some flour, and then poppy seeds and honey. So very, very few ingredients, very, very little instruction, really, but we're gonna try it. So Cato says for the sawillum, take half a pound of flour, two and a half pounds of cheese, and mix together. Then you have to add a quarter pound of honey and one egg. That doesn't sound too hard, but I have lots of cheesecloth and lots of milk and, of course, lots of acid because to make cheese, you pretty much need two ingredients, just milk and an acid in order to bring out the curds. So we have all of this lovely stuff here, and what I'm going to do is talk to you about ancient Rome and cheesemaking while I make the cheese. All right, so big pot for big cheese. So let's just pour all of this milk in here. I'm using goat's milk. So the manufacturing of cheese was pretty much mastered once we got to ancient Rome, and a lot of people were writing about it. So we have Cato writing about it. Pliny wrote about it. He was a huge fan of cheese, but mostly French cheeses, so I don't know how well that boded for a Roman talking about French cheese, but there you have it. We also have writings of making cheese from a guy named Columella in ancient Rome, and as I said earlier, cheese is made very simply from milk and some sort of acid. Ancient Romans, they used rennet, so that was a little bit more less vegetarian-friendly, so I'm going to be using some lemons as my rennet, and the Romans referred to rennet as coagulum because of the whey and the curds that form, so everything kind of coagulates in the milk because milk is an emulsion, some science food there, and we also get some word origins as well, so this is just a multidisciplinary show today, you guys, and the Romans did not use cow's milk for their recipes because animals that are more native to the area at the time are goats and sheep, so that is why I'm using goat milk to make this ricotta because I want to make it as authentic as possible, and also, who doesn't love goat's cheese? It's freaking delicious. So before we put this on the heat, I'm going to just juice all of our lemons so we have it ready to go, so I'm just gonna move this over to the stove, heat it up, so then when we add our acid, it will just really get all the coagulants, get those curds and whey all separated, and then we can make our cheese. Shake it up, baby, now, shake it up, baby. Twist and shout, twist and shout. Come on, come on, come on, come on, baby, now. Lay down on the pillow now. All right, we got lemon juice. I'm gonna go over to the stove, heat up our milk, then I'll bring it back over here, add in our acid, and then we can watch the magical curds appear. Ooh, I'm excited, I'm excited. Oh, boy, okay, well, I hope it's ready. The milk is piping hot, so we are going to just pour in our lemon juice here, and now we wait five minutes. Hopefully, the long-awaited curdles will appear. Oh, my God, oh, no, I hope I did this right, oh, no. Five minutes later. 15 minutes later. Hmm, all right, my curdled milk is not curdled. One hour later. All right, all right, well, it seems like it might be curdled, so we're gonna try it, we're gonna see how it goes. I have the back-up cheese now that I went and got it. So we have our cheesecloth in our pan, and I'm just gonna pour this in here, there we go. Oh, boy, curds, I made a, oh, my God, what am I doing? Hey, hey, look at that, it's super hot, oh, boy. Hoo, hoo, hoo, oh, man, it's oddly, it feels like a boob, but it kinda makes sense, it came from a boob, I guess, I don't know. All right, so now I just have to let this kinda hang out and drain for about an hour or two, get more moisture out of it, so I'm just gonna twist it up real nice right here. Okay, I'm gonna go wash everything up and probably shower and de-stink the house, and when this is ready, we're gonna come back and make some sawillam, this better be worth it. Okay, guys, so after all of that, we have our cheese, we have all of the other ingredients that we need to make the cheesecake, the sawillam, pray for me that it turn into cheese. I realize I should not have been squeezing it when it was hot, because that was just a bad idea, both for my hands and apparently for the cheese, but, you know, you live and you learn. Oh, look at that, oh, wow, oh, I made cheese, oh. Smells kinda gross, it's beautiful, it's just so beautiful. Oh my gosh, I feel so proud of myself right now. Okay, so Kato said we need two and a half pounds of cheese, so I'm just going with generic pounds because I don't want to translate everything from Roman pounds. All right, so we got the cheese in, excellent. So we're gonna put in that egg, egg. Now we put in our flour, and then we have here, he says a quarter pound of honey. The Romans did use their honey quite a bit in cooking and dishes, everything like that, and we don't actually have archeological remains of any beehives that they kept, because the Romans, when they were doing their beekeeping, they actually preferred to use these biodegradable type beehives, so we don't actually have any evidence, archeologically speaking, of the beehives themselves, but we know that they did have honey because everyone wrote about it quite a bit, and it is one of those just kind of generic staples that you get in the ancient world for added sweeteners. All right, so now we just mix it up here. Just gonna get my hands in there. Oh, it's so gooey, but it is coming together to look kind of like a cheesecake. Wow, okay, okay. So Kato's recipe calls for the cheese to be put in a greased out earthenware dish. I do not own any earthenware dishes, so it's not gonna happen that way. What I'm gonna do instead, because there's not enough of this to go into this, I'm gonna make mini cheesecakes. I'm using olive oil because the Romans, you know, olive oil, Italian cooking. Let's divvy it out here. Here we go. All right, so I have our six little cheesecakes in my muffin tin. I'm gonna put them in the oven. We're just gonna stick a toothpick in it to make sure that it is cooked all the way through while I'm testing it. And Kato, again, never said how long to put it in the oven or what temperature to put it at, so I'm just guessing and seeing what happens. Let's do it. All right, so while those are in the oven, because this looks a little mealy, I'm gonna just throw in a splash of goat's milk into the leftover batter, just to see what happens if I kind of just rehydrate it a little bit, because I think when I made my cheese, I might have just squeezed a little bit too much liquid out of it. I was too excited with the whole process of it. Oh, that looks much better. Okay, so we learned that Raven makes a really dry cheese. Do not eat Raven's cheese, but we've been able to save some of this batter. Makes it look a lot smoother. Oh yeah, that's much better. Just rehydrate the cheese with its own mother. All right, so what I'm gonna do with this one is I'm gonna just kind of form it into a little thing on this guy here and just see what happens. All right, well, that looks a little bit more like a cheesecake. It's definitely no New York cheesecake, I'll tell you that. A little longer than a few minutes later. Sawillam, oh yes, okay. Oh, yes, yes, I hear you, I hear you. All right, so we have our two different versions of sawillam right here. Now, Kato says once it's out of the oven, we have to just cover it in more honey. Just drizzle it, babe, oh yeah. All right, so now that we have our honey, the last thing that we are adding to our cheesecakes is a handful of poppy seeds. Kato says to just kind of spread them all around, so that's what I'm gonna do, just give them a generous sprinkling on top here. Poppy seeds, of course, come from the poppy flower, and there's actually evidence of the poppy being adopted into farming as early as the 6th millennium BCE in the Alps. It's been domesticated quite early, and it's very, oh, my honey's all falling off this guy. It's very, very familiar with continental Europe, so it would have definitely been in Rome. Everyone loves the poppy. We also have ancient references to opium production dating back to around the 4th millennium BCE on Sumerian clay tablets. The Romans really did love their poppy seeds, and you can see that in the cookbook written by Apicius as well. So I'm just gonna make sure we give the poppy enough love here, like the, like salt bae. And now my kitchen is covered in poppy seeds, but we're gonna put this back in the oven. First, we have to cover it. I don't have a proper cover for everything, so I'm gonna put tinfoil over this. Thousands of tears later. Whew, all right. So we have our little mini cheesecakes that I made and the slightly larger cheesecake here fresh out of the oven. And I do say it doesn't smell like cheesecake. It smells like honey. But let's uncover it and see what this bad boy looks like. Ooh. That's just not too bad looking. Pretty proud of myself right there. Ooh, delicious. They look pretty good. I am impressed. They, you know, I kind of, I think they kind of just came together at the last second there. So I've waited a little bit for it to cool, but Cater doesn't really say it, that you should cool it. It just kind of says, remove it from the fire. And he also says, serve in the dish with a spoon. So I don't even have to worry about plating these bad boys, which is excellent. But of course I need to bring in my number one taste tester, Gert. Oh, I've been hiding down there for a long time. It took a long time to make these. It's smelling good. Yeah. Looking great. Is that poppy seed all over it? Poppy seed all over it. The honey kind of drizzled off this one, but we're going to see. And this is also my attempt at trying to be fancy. Look at me, Michelin star. Ooh, it's hot. Don't touch the things you just took out the oven. I'm just very excited. And where's this from? Ancient Rome. Oh, nice. So we shall eat as the Romans. Eat as the Romans do. Which would you like to try first? Which is the OG? The OG is this one. Well, this one is before I added the goat's milk. Ooh. Ooh, okay. Very firm. Well, the proof is in the pudding. Cheers. You can definitely taste cheese. And honey. It's quite firm. It's very firm. It's firmer than any cheesecake I've had before. It's usually, and heavier as well. Well, it's supposed to just, you know, it's not like New York cheesecake. No. It's sweet cake with cheese. That's what I'm trying to say. You should open with that. Yeah. Now I'm re-imagining it. Okay. I came into it expecting a cheesecake. Very light. That's how I get you in the kitchen. A graham cracker crust. But now it's a cake made out of cheese. Let's try that again. Like, are we, am I imagining us on the battlefield? No, you wouldn't be on the battlefield. Well, we're in our beautiful villa. Yeah, you could be in a villa. You could be on the farm. This was written by Cato. Cato, he was like that Roman guy who really liked going back to the farm after battle. So like farmer's house. So this is the Cato diet. Yeah. It's a popular diet called the Keto diet. Yes, I know. When I make you laugh, she feels stupid. All right. So this one? This is, I just kind of made the batter a little bit. Is it batter even? I don't know. I mean, I made the dough a little bit wetter. I added some extra goat's milk to make it a little bit nicer. And it has a little bit of a different gift than the other one. This has a more cheesy flavor. I like this one more. It's lighter, less doughy. This is probably, I think this is more like authentic tasting. I would say the fact that we like are eating multiple spoonfuls of this one is a good sign. But you made cheese. I made cheese. It's like one of those human development stories. Exactly. Humans sat down, agriculture, cheese. Well, that's it, right? You have to really go for it. Like first you have to domesticate the animal. That's me. Then you have to figure out, oh, I can drink the milk of this animal. Then you realize, hmm, if I add this like weird ingredient, it will coagulate. And if I separate the bits that coagulated from the bits that didn't coagulate, I get cheese. You clearly like it. Are you just eating it because you're just... I like it. What would you add to this? Now with a couple thousand years of hindsight, what do you think the Romans could have done to improve it? Well, I would not make my own cheese. Really? Yes. That's, I feel like someone suggested that. It was for science. It was. I'm really impressed. And I did it. Look what I did. I like it. What I might add to it is a bit of fruit. I would add a little bit of salt in there. I would add maybe some maple syrup instead of honey. And then I would do a blueberry glaze. Yeah, I think the blueberry is a good touch. Yeah. So next time, blueberries. Welp, that was Sevillem. That was a trial, an ordeal, but an adventure. And I say it was a pretty successful one. I will, you know? All right, if you liked that video, go ahead and smash that like button down below. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel while you're at it because the next ancient recipe video, I'm doing something super, super cool. Big thank you to all of my patrons over on Patreon. If you liked the video and you like the channel and you want to support it, go become a patron on Patreon. Here's all my socials. And as always, stay dirty, my friends.