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YOGHURT ISN'T CAKE
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this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2026
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No. Ost means cheese, kaka means cake. It can also mean biscuit or cookie depending on what type of English you speak.
It's honestly a lot more like that. If you say biscuit in England, that generally conjures up a picture of a small-ish, often round, harder, dry pastry. In the U.S. a biscuit is closer to what you in England would call a scone.
When we use the Swedish word ostkaka, we refer to the Swedish cheesecake. When we use the English word cheesecake, no one expects a Swedish cheesecake. The cake is made by making cheese, so I don't really know how much more of a cheesecake it could be.
So if I take a glass, fill it with cream, and put ice on top, am I now eating ice cream?
Even if I decided to call it that, you'd probably tell me that no one else would think of that as ice cream, even if I call it such or even if it's the technically correct name, and that arguing that it is ice cream is very pedantic for no discernable reason.
That would apply with the yoghurt biscuit thing, but not in the case of Swedish cheesecake.
Do you know how cheese is made? Generally, cottage and cream cheese is made by heating it, adding a coagulant, and separating out the curds from the whey. Generally the difference is that cream cheese has a higher amount of milk fats, that is cream.
Now look at the recipe I linked. You make cheese and turn it into a cake.
It's a cheesecake.
The reason we differentiate between American cheesecake and ostkaka in Swedish is because both entities exist simultaneously within the same cultural context. Ostkaka isn't really prevalent in the anglosphere, hence just calling it "Swedish cheesecake" makes the most sense. If I walked up to a random anglophone and said "I'm going to make an ostkaka today" they'd have no idea what I'm talking about.
How does this argument not work with "tinte means ink, fisch means fisch, therefore tintenfisch means ink fish"? Or maybe a better example would be translating "Warenhaus" as follows: "Ware means ware, Haus means house, so Warenhaus means warehouse" when the actual translation is "department store". (The difference between the two examples is that "ink fish" is not an English compound word, whereas "warehouse" is, yet it's still the wrong translation).
So, I still think that translating "ostkaka" as "cheesecake" is dubious.
Well, I don't know what to tell you. You're allowed to be wrong, I guess.
Ostkaka is a type of cake made from cheese, ergo cheesecake is a perfectly fine translation. In Swedish we have a distinction between the two, but I also would likely say "Swedish cheesecake" if I'm specifically talking about one originating from Sweden.
Would you say that a basque cheesecake isn't a cheesecake?
It's hard to actually have a conversation about this if you don't respond to the things I'm saying. Do you think it's reasonable to translate Warenhaus as warehouse? If not, what's the difference?
Because I'm not sure how much clearer I can be. Smålandsostkaka as well as Hälsingeostkaka are both types of cheesecake on account of both being cakes made out of cheese. In Swedish we distinguish between the words cheesecake and ostkaka, but that's a cultural thing.
You're essentially saying that spätzle isn't a type of pasta because people differentiate between spätzle and penne rigate. Or that brie isn't a type of cheese because there's a difference between brie and gouda.
You could be clearer by answering the question that I ask now for the third time:
now,
So, if you take the keys (i.e. the tables describing the meaning of symbols) of several maps and paste them onto a board, is what you have a keyboard? If your keyboard is coloured black, can you describe it as a blackboard?
The fact is that compound words have their own meanings, separate from the meaning of their components. Football refers not only to the ball, but the game it is played with - a completely different thing. If you created a spherical object out of rabbits' feet, it would not be valid to call it a "football" except as some kind of poetic irony.
So too with cheesecake. Cheesecake is a word in its own right; it is not valid to simply analyse it as meaning "any kind of cake made with any kind of cheese." You have to look at its actual usage in practice.
Okay, let's flip it. What would you call it?
Go look up what a cheesecake is.
Ostkaka. Same as the title of the wikipedia article.
Right, that's what it's called in Swedish. Feel free to call it that and no one outside of the Nordics will have any idea of what you're talking about. In English we could call it Swedish cheesecake if you need to be particularly verbose about it. Because it is a cheesecake.
Cheesecake was a thing for many centuries before the NYC style was first made. Hell, Swedish cheesecake predates the existence of the U.S. by a couple hundred years as well.
This conversation bores me, and so I sign off. You're allowed to be wrong.
It's not like anyone is going to know what "Swedish cheesecake" means either - you're gonna have to explain it either way, so I think taking it as a loanword is the perfect one.
Bye then. I hope you learnt something about linguistics!