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Comment by ThePadawan | Hacker News Reader

Lingustic shoutout to Switzerland, where cheesecake contains actual [grated, hard] cheese.

For the German speakers: "Käsekuchen" (literally "cheesecake") in Germany, Poland and other countries of the region uses Quark, which is untranslateable, but is texture-wise somewhere between light cream cheese and pressed Greek Yogurt. It's not usually referred to as a cheese within Germany any more. So Käsekuchen is a sweet cake that goes well with red jam and fresh cream, or served with coffee.

Käsekuchen in Switzerland (again, "cheesecake") is a pie with a filling based on cream and grated hard cheese. If you want the sweet German cake, you have to order "Cheesecake" (using the English word!), not "Käsekuchen".

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> Quark, which is untranslateable

Well, "quark" is an English word now too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_(dairy_product)

Touché.

Cream cheese is not cheese?

See, there's a lot of nuance in German.

There is no equivalence between most dairy products between Germany and the English-speaking world. Most terms are just untranslatable because they refer to similar but slightly different concepts.

There is fresh white spreadable cheese ("Frischkäse"), but it's savoury, not sweet, and less fatty than American-style cream cheese. You certainly wouldn't use it to frost a cake. If you spread Frischkäse on a sandwich and handed it to someone as a "cheese sandwich", they would probably be a bit surprised but accept it as a cheese sandwich.

But Frischkäse doesn't go in Käsekuchen. Maybe my description of Quark was misleading, but it is terribly hard to describe since it literally just does not have any equivalent product in the US. Imagine describing marshmallow fluff or root beer to a European.

American cream cheese is not particularly sweet. It is frequently used as an ingredient in savory dishes.

Most of the cheeses I ate when living in Germany are available in the US in the cheese section of a reasonably nice grocery store; the reverse wasn’t true at the time, my German friends had odd ideas about what cheeses Americans eat.

> Most of the cheeses I ate when living in Germany are available in the US in the cheese section of a reasonably nice grocery store

I was trying to express a more generic statement. Germany has Quark, which the US doesn't, even though it could (and probably does if you have a Polish supermarket). The US has half-and-half [half cream and half milk], which is completely unknown in Germany, but there are like, 4 different levels of fat content for cream.

I.e. if a German reads a recipe from the US that includes Heavy Whipping Cream, they just have to look up what that is and find something that is similar-ish. The identical product might not exist, since the dairy industry produces different products fitting specific legal definitions.

Here in southern bavaria, frischkäse certainly goes into käsekuchen, never heart of using quark...

That's really wild! I looked at the top 10 recipes on Chefkoch and they all have Quark except one labelled "NY style cheese cake" which uses all of Frischkäse and Quark and cream.

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