354 replies to this topic

[therese]

Cheesecake is neither cake nor pie, so should be excluded.

See, now you're just weaselling to back up your original answer, because you've re-thought the whole issue, and a whole, knotty bunch of outliers have reared their ugly, yet delicious, heads. Cheesecake is clearly pie, and how could you disagree with Alton Brown, anyway? You two are practically the same person.

Cheesecake isn't one of my favorites, actually, though I do prefer it to some other desserts. So I'm not worried about which category it falls into myself, I just didn't want anybody else to think that cheesecake need be characterized as either cake or pie.

And I stand by my statement that it's neither cake nor pie.

[cajungirl]

My O My, I do love Pie! Can anything compare to the buttery flaky crust of a peach pie during the height of the season? The tart sweet taste and the crunch of the crust....mm...mm..mm. I'm in heaven thinking of it!

[Jensen]

Without a doubt, pie.

There, I've just put to rest the rumour that Therese and I are in fact the same person. (Apparently, we're complementary versions of ourselves...)

In order of preference: transparent pie, custard pie, then fruit pie.

Meat pies trump them all.

[Pontormo]

The quarrel over classification of cheesecake gives me pause.

My favorite dessert in the whole wide world is a pumpkin pie, just set, removed from the oven when the center was a teeny bit wobbly, but now solid. Lots of fresh ginger. Made from fresh, roasted organic pumpkin, of course. Cream, but condensed milk more than acceptable. Flaky crust. Cool. Icebox cold next morning even better, though see remark about crust above.

I love tarts and crostada and whatever name you want to use. Perfect fruit. Perfect custard. These are pies, dammit and with the right apricot, raspberry, apple or pear, yum. Peach? The best of all. The first elegant dessert I made was Julia Child's and even though the custard was runny, it will be my favorite forever and ever. Of course, peaches are the best fruit in the whole wide world as everyone knows.

As far as I'm concerned Tart Tatin is pie. You bake it in Pyrex. You saute the apples in butter and sugar and cover them with a crust. It's pie. That kind of pastry, unlike the solidified batter on the pineapple upside-down cake, makes it a pie.

And Boston cream pie is a cake.

Now, while I love pumpkin pie more than any other dessert, I still would choose cake over pie.

Why?

In part, I am skeptical about the existence of the soul, believing it to be a cultural construct. I am not sure I have one, though I certainly feel compassion and can get down when the music calls for it. I do have a stomach, most definitely, and taste buds, and most of all a brain that carries the past and nerve endings that attach personal history to taste buds and said stomach.

Cake is birthday parties, first of all.

Cake is special occasions.

Cake takes more work. Eggs get separated. Whisks spin. Muscles tire. Lots of pans. Butter needs to sit out first. Beaters get licked. There's goo. There is layer after layer. It's more complex. It can be in any shape you want. You can put gummy worms stuck going in and out the frosting as if burrowing into the chocolate earth. There's something light with crumb and texture...if you're lucky. Bad things happen if things go wrong. Skill and weather and chance are all messed up with cake. Cake's a better metaphor for life than pie or even a bowl of cherries.

For someone who was [told she was] allergic to wheat as a child old enough to have built up a memory of five or six birthday cakes of her own plus all the others of cousins, aunts, uncles, parents and grandparents and friends, to be denied cake was devastating. Cheesecake has flour mixed into the cream cheese along with the eggs according to parents, and so it, too, was taboo and it, too, was cake. Pie? You could eat the stuff inside the crust, easy. Cake had more mystique. And when, finally, you discovered you could eat it again, cake was still special. Cake was and remains Paradise Regained.

Besides, chocolate cake is so much better than chocolate pie.

Ling?

Edited by Pontormo, 26 April 2006 - 03:15 PM.

[sanrensho]

For those who insist that cheesecake is pie, please feel free to call it cheesepie from now on.

After all, if the shoe fits...

[BubbleheadChef]

Now the question pops into my head.....does geography play a role? I come from a "joined family". Dad and 3 boys from the west coast, Stepmom and 3 kids fromt he midwest. Every time we had dessert in the house (not often, but it did happen on occasion), we would have a mini-civil war. Us west coaster's thought that cake was the only way to celebrate a special occasion. Nothing compares to a cake on a celebratory level. To "them", a pie was the end all, be all. After 10 years of battle, we made a compromise to call a cheesecake the middle ground. I mean, what kind of freak can't enjoy a cheesecake?

IMHO, pies are common. They come from things just lying around; fruit, nuts, etc. A CAKE on the other hand, means there is TRULY something to celebrate. So, I guess my answer is cake.

[FabulousFoodBabe]

That wonderful cheese filling can be put into a pastry crust ... or piled onto a cookie crust (Oreos with a little butter ... mmmmm).

Cheesecake IS pie.

Another great thing about pie, is that there's always leftover filling. More than a beater's worth, if you plan properly

[Varmint]

And to open another can of worms, we have crabcakes and chicken pot pie. Pasties, too. But then, we must also consider the scourge of savory pie, also known as "Hot Pockets." But I digress. We're talking desserts, not savory items.

I must admit to eating toasted pound cake for breakfast quite frequently. This morning, for example. But then, I had no pie available.

One additional vote of support for pie can be attributed to how difficult it is to make, as evidenced in the song "Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better" from Annie Get Your Gun, when Annie and Frank exchange:

"Can you bake a pie?"
"No"
"Neither can I."


Even further evidence for pie comes from the movies. A search for the word "pie" in movie titles (see Internet Movie Database) resulted in 117 selections. A search for cake only resulted in 55. We also have Don McLean's "American Pie" which everyone will admit is a vastly better song than "MacArthur Park", where someone left the cake out in the rain. No one would ever leave pie out in the rain.

[Pontormo]

Honey, let's cakewalk.



Edited not only because I overlooked the fact that "cakewalk" did indeed speak early in this thread, but also for the following addition: I just learned that like the "pie in the sky" line in the song by the worker's union, here "cake" does not have positive connotations. The African-American dance did become popular and its original significance got lost when it entered mainstream culture. However, it originally was a subtle, hidden way to mock the hoighty-toity ways that umm members of the hegemonic culture danced when they were dressed up and being sophisticated. Therefore, this post does not support the superioty of cake and undermines my original intentions.

Edited by Pontormo, 26 April 2006 - 04:30 PM.

[Pontormo]

Is that pie on your face?

[Pontormo]

I take the cake!

[Pontormo]

You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.

(Last one, but please note, this is a PARODY of a hymn, sung by the Wobblies, a worker's union. The tone's sarcastic, so lyrics cannot be used in defense of pie. Sorry. Cake still wins.)

Edited by Pontormo, 26 April 2006 - 03:25 PM.

[Varmint]

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned pizza -- pizza pie, that is. But again, I digress.

[mizducky]

On whether to classify a baked confection as pie or cake, it's IMO important not to be swayed by whatever name has traditionally been hung on the dessert in question, traditional names for dishes being notorious for their sometimes-sketchy relationship to the thing named--just one of many examples: the egg cream, which contains neither egg nor cream. No, as in the biological sciences, you have to look at the form and structure of the item in question in order to establish proper classification.

In the case of pie vs. cake, this is elegantly simple to do:

If it's got a discrete crust (whether of pastry, crumbs, or whatever), it's a pie.

If it doesn't, it's a cake ... or something. But a pie it ain't.

So-called "crustless pies", while delicious, are often at base discovered to be some other food item entirely--usually a frittata or other omelette-type thing.

Conclusion: cheesecakes have crusts, therefore they're pie. Boston cream pies don't have crusts, therefore they're cake. Regardless of the whims of history that hung those names on them.

Edited by mizducky, 26 April 2006 - 03:29 PM.

[Toliver]

Conclusion: cheesecakes have crusts, therefore they're pie.

Some baked cheesecakes don't have a bottom crust.

[sanrensho]

Conclusion: cheesecakes have crusts, therefore they're pie.

Some baked cheesecakes don't have a bottom crust.

Quite true. And I prefer cheesecake with a thin layer of biscuit (cake) underneath.

[Arey]

I'm in the cake camp.

I like pie, but find many, especially American-style fruit pies, to be gooey and wet. A waste of fruit.

Plus there's no frosting on pie, dammit.

Dutch apple pie has frosting.

I have to cast a vote for cake. Going way back to my childhood, when everything was better, I showed a definite preference for Butterscotch Krimpets, followed by Chocolate Juniors, then Coconut Juniors (and I don't particularly care for coconut), and if none of them were available apple pies. I'm talking TastyKake mind you.

At bake sales, my mother would always ask if a cake was "made from scratch". There were rumors going around back then, that some women were actually contributing cakes to the cake sales that were made from MIXES (horrible dictu).

[Nina C.]

A question of such great importance has taken me all day and several water-cooler conversations with co-workers to ponder. At first, I thought pie, hands down. The crunch of the crust, followed by the softness of the filling can make me swoon. Not to mention the easy accompianment by ice cream,

Plus, pie is the food of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and large family gatherings.

But then, I realized that perhaps my bias is because there are way too many mediocre cakes out there in the world. Because pie takes more work, particularly with the proliferation of cake mixes out there, it seems that anyone who takes the time to make a pie, makes a pretty decent one.

And there is one cake that my mother used to make out of the San Antonio Junior League Flavors cookbook that I'd trade pie for any day -- a sponge cake I think, with a creamy icing, and shards of caramel candy and almonds dotting the top like a porcupine. See - contrast of textures! And another time-consuming labor of love.

So my final verdict is most pie over most cake, but excellent cake over excellent pie.
Is that too namby-pamby?

[NWKate]

What a dilemma! While I must come down on the side of cake( since I always make double chocolate cake with raspberry finning and mocha whipped cream frosting for my birthday), I also must put in another vote for the Farm Journal's Pie Cookbook- it has the most reliable recipes I've ever found. While one might argue that pies are more versatile given the number of both sweet, protein filled, and savory available, I still want cake for my birthday ( and, well, every day!).

Sweetly,

Kate

[Della]

PIE! No question about it - Pie everytime.
Cake is too cakey - too sweet - too much frosting. Although I like an occasional piece of cake w/o the frosting.
Give me fruit pie and I will happily eat it every day of the week - especially for breakfast!!
And Alton Brown is right about cheesecake which is just a custard pie

[natasha1270]

pat a cake, pat a cake...

baba cake, hotcake, johnny cake, pancake, king cake, doughnut, doughnut cake, gingerbread cake, fruit cake, wedding cake, christening cake, teacake, coffee cake, pound cake, cupcake, bundt cake, shortcake, biscuit, scone...

N., who wonders where would we be without cake?

[Pontormo]

Why does this all make me want to log out and bake oatmeal cookies with dark chocolate chips?

Ta.

[mizducky]

Conclusion: cheesecakes have crusts, therefore they're pie.

Some baked cheesecakes don't have a bottom crust.

In which case my statement about so-called "crustless pies" not really being pies applies. (How's that for internal rhyme? )

Edited to add--okay, I did not explicity state that "crustless pies" are not true pies. But the implication I left that such items were in fact some other category of foodstuff shows that I *meant* to say that. And that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Edited by mizducky, 26 April 2006 - 04:41 PM.

[mizducky]

Conclusion: cheesecakes have crusts, therefore they're pie.

Some baked cheesecakes don't have a bottom crust.

Quite true. And I prefer cheesecake with a thin layer of biscuit (cake) underneath.

If it's a discrete crust, it's crust. The composition is immaterial, the function is all.

Oh, and just in case anyone is tempted to go there ... no, the "crust" on bread does not mean bread == pie. Bread crust is not discrete, but an integral part of the loaf. It's simply bread dough that happened to be lucky enough to be on the surface of the loaf where it could get browning. Whereas a pie crust is of a different composition from the stuff it's containing/supporting, usually constructed by an entirely different process from that which created the filling it contains.

And now I just can't resist:

"Pie "R" square?!? Pies aren't square! Pies are round!"

(running away very fast )

Edited by mizducky, 26 April 2006 - 04:56 PM.

[prasantrin]

Cake. I will almost always order cake over pie. But I have noticed that even the worst pies are still better than the worst cakes, so if I have an inkling that the cake is crappy, I'll take the pie. I definitely prefer cakes, though.

[hsm]

It's been a pleasure remembering lots of the lovely cakes I've consumed. And all those happy occasions that call for cake!

But for me, nothing beats a damn fine piece of pie.

[therese]

Although cheesecake typically includes a crust, I rarely find it very interesting: soggy cookie crumb sort of thing, easily ignored. A real pie includes crust that's important to the dessert.

[FabulousFoodBabe]

Although cheesecake typically includes a crust, I rarely find it very interesting: soggy cookie crumb sort of thing, easily ignored. A real pie includes crust that's important to the dessert.

Sounds to me like you've been good cheesecake/pie deprived. Soggy cookie crumb crusts? Bleah! The good ones have crusts you can hear snap when your fork gets into them.

[MissAmy]

THAT is a tough question! Oooh.. So, I guess the answer, "It depends on what kind of cake or pie," is not an option, correct?

In that case... I'll have to say cake. I'll NEVER turn down a peice of cake. However, I'm unlikely to turn down pie as well. But I still so dearly love a great peice of cake.

[Marlene]

Cake, most definately cake. My brother and I are in opposite camps as he prefers pie, raspberry to be specific. My mother always made pie, never cake. If I wanted a cake growing up, I made it myself Cakes can be elaborate structures, four layers of light airy goodness and frosting. They can be cupcakes and mini cakes.

I choose cake.