Shavuot Cheesecake Didn't Come From Sinai

Every Shavuot, Jewish kitchens produce cheesecake by the kilo. The usual explanation is that after receiving the Torah at Sinai, the Israelites discovered their pots and knives were not kosher, so they ate dairy. It is a wonderful story. It is also almost certainly not where the custom came from. The real story begins much later, in medieval Ashkenaz. Around 1270, Rabbi Avigdor Tzarfati already knows that Jews are eating dairy on Shavuot – specifically fladen, a German flat cheese pastry – but he admits he does not know why. From there, the trail leads into the seasonal food world of the medieval Rhineland: late-spring milk, fresh cheese, German vlade, Yiddish fluden, cheese blintzes, New York cream cheese, and finally the Shavuot cheesecake we know today. This custom did not grow in the desert. It grew in the cold soil of Europe – beside cattle, markets, Jewish kitchens, Christian neighbors, and the late-spring flood of milk. That does not make the custom less Jewish. It makes it more historical.