Cake Vs. Pie: THE IMMORTAL BATTLE
Which dessert confection is superior? I dive in to find the answer.
Social media is for three distinct purposes. The first is to engage in grassroots movements to enact social change only to see those movements co-opted by the tech lords who want to make their capitalistic overreach appear woke. There is no greater distillation of this purpose than this tweet by corporate wrestling faildaughter Stephanie McMahon quoting one of Twitter’s founders:
The second purpose is to yell at brands, either when they provide substandard customer service or when they too try to appear woke when they’re just brands. One can keep special vigilance when brands insert themselves into solemn holidays and anniversaries, like Spaghetti-Os!
The third, and most solemn, of purposes is to have insane yet trivial arguments about the most benign topics. I covered one of those debates last month with the animal survival selection meme. Another one that has raged hard off and on for years, although it has become a cold war now, is the debate on whether a hot dog is a sandwich. Another such war that burnt hotter longer ago is cake vs. pie, but unlike the hot dog is a sandwich debate, it has hotter flashes more often. That’s because it’s more of a pertinent debate, longer lasting, less of a novelty. And now, in this issue, I will weigh in on it. These questions are the ones that hit hard enough to warrant their own issues, no? Cake vs. pie, the dessert battle rages hard.
The Case for Cake
Birthdays would be incomplete without it. What better way to celebrate the anniversary of your birth than with something moist, sweet, decadent? It is the perfect emblem for the celebration of life, or moreover, the idea that the person celebrated is happy to be here. It’s a symbol of celebration unlike any other. Why do you think they serve cake at weddings? Eating a cake can put you on top of the world because you know there’s a reason you’re eating it. You’re happy, or maybe you’re trying to make yourself happy.
The reason is that cake is an incredibly versatile food. It can be fluffy, almost as if a cloud manifested itself into this sacred edible on a plate. It can be dense, packed with butter or chocolate or crème. It can be unadorned, presented simply by itself, or it can be soaked in syrup or rum, frosted with any manner of sweet and creamy icing, layered with jelly or ganache. No matter how it is presented or served though, it is always a reminder that you don’t have to be an aristocrat to feel like you have the best things in the world on your plate.
The Case against Cake
“Let them eat cake” is a line from Marie Antoinette that became a rallying cry for the French Revolution. It was a line dripping with sarcasm because she always thought the plight of the people gathered outside of her palace were their own faults. If they wanted cake, they should eat it, right? The problem is the cake she was eating and any cake a French peasant was eating were not the same thing. There’s no bigger discrepancy between fancy and proletarian quality than in cake. There are foods where the maker doesn’t matter. There are foods that are totally made better by the sketchy guy in a food cart of dubious providence on a street corner than by a royal chef. Cake is neither of those.
Everyone reading this has had a Duncan-Hines box cake. They’re good; don’t get me wrong. But if you go to a wedding and the cake tastes like it came out of a box, the father of the bride will have heads rolling the next day. Cake in and of itself is a bourgeois food. The best cakes in the world are behind the oldest and cruelest paywalls. There’s a reason that outside of Food Network, the word “decadent” has a negative connotation. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the box cake. Everyone should be allowed to indulge in whatever foods make them happy. Cake, however, is one of those foods where the ingredients matter and where the level of training of the baker absolutely matters.
Plus, half the cakes in the world seem like they’re not meant to be eaten. Cakes covered in nasty, near inedible fondant icing are meant only to be seen, not eaten. How are you going to waste ingredients on something you’re not even supposed to eat? Cake art is the HEIGHT of excess and waste. People do not make showpiece pies.
The Case for Pie
Few things are as wholesome as a good pie. American mythmakers got one thing right in including apple pie in the list of wholly American and wholly warm and comforting things. Few things embody the idea of “comfort food” than a heated slice of pie paired with an ice-cold glass of milk. While cake’s entire reason for being is to serve as a reminder of life’s potential decadence, pie doesn’t need to flaunt it in your face. The buttery crust and the boldly sweet filling combine for the kind of dessert experience that rivals any other dessert without asserting pretentiously its place in the hierarchy.
Pie can do this with infinite possibility as well. For as versatile as cake can be, the varieties of pie are as vast as the stars in the sky. If you can grow it, cook it, or cream it, you can put it in a pie. Fruit is the ideal paint that adorns that buttery and golden brown canvas of crust. Apples, strawberries, bananas, limes, even the misunderstood rhubarb all make incredibly satisfying pies. However, the possibilities for fillings are only limited by one’s imagination. The Pennsylvania Dutch even put a molasses-based mixture in the pie crust for something as delightfully sultry as it is sweet in shoo-fly pie.
Hell, you don’t even have to bake pie. You can fry them, and they’ll still maintain their integrity as a thing. If you fry cake batter, you know what you get? A donut. Donuts are a whole different thing than cake, but a fried pie is still a pie no matter how you dress it up. That’s the inherent beauty of the whole thing. It isn’t as rigid or as structured a thing as cake is.
The Case against Pie
You ever had a bad slice of cake? Of course you have. No one’s batting average for any kind of food off a meaningful sample size is 1.000. Bad cake is dry or overly dense, and it can leave a bad imprint on your memory for sure. Bad pie, however? It’s a fucking disaster. You buy a bad pie from the supermarket, one that has been shipped from a central baking location, and it’s just so depressingly bad. It’s slimy and/or cloying, and the crust is a soggy mess. You might get a bellyache with bad cake, but bad pie might give you nightmares.
Making pie has less margin for error as well. While cake requires a lot of skill to make on the best levels, the box cakes are pretty much idiot-proof. There’s no “box pie” recipe you can make. Even with pre-made crust, the filling can go sideways in an instant. If cake is the bourgeois dessert, pie is the proletarian one, and thusly, it is very labor intensive, less beholden to exact mixtures and temperatures as it is to the deft hand of the person making it, a skill that can’t be gleaned from a book but from hours of practice. Even then, the best piemakers still make a soupy pecan pie every once in awhile, and that’s far more depressing than even the worst cakes.
THE VERDICT
I’m not an absolutist either way. Cake can be great. Pie can be wonderful. Battles, however, are not fought to stalemate. This is the Internet, man; there has to be a winner. As much as I have deliberated this question over the years, I can only come to one conclusion. Pie is the superior dessert conveyance. I love the variety. I love the simplicity. And most importantly, I love the buttery, flaky, rich crusts. Pie wins this battle, but rest assured there will be others. This is the Internet, after all. I’m not the kind of person who yells at brands, and social movements are the kinds of things you do out of moral duty, not spare time. I live for these pointless debates, man.
Photos: me with cake - Amanda Holzerman. shoo-fly pie - me.