Is Cheesecake a Cake or a Pie? The Argument, Settled

Is cheesecake a cake or a pie?

Is cheesecake a cake or a pie? The name says cake, the structure says pie, and food writers have been arguing about it for years. Even reference books disagree: some call it a cake, some a custard pie, some a tart or a torte. Wikipedia's summary of the debate says modern cheesecake is not usually classified as an actual cake, despite the name.

Names are weak evidence in food arguments. Boston cream pie is a cake, after all, and nobody thinks its name settles anything. So the honest way through this one is to look at what cheesecake is made of and how it is baked, then decide whether the name gets a vote at all.

The case for cake

The cake side starts with the name, which has been around in English since the 15th century. It also has a dictionary: the Cambridge Dictionary defines cheesecake as a cake made from a layer of biscuit or sweet pastry base, covered with soft cheese, eggs, sugar and sometimes fruit.

Then there is how we eat it. Cheesecake is baked in a round springform pan, cut into wedges, served at birthdays, and sold in the cake case at bakeries. Some styles also lean hard toward cake: Japanese cheesecake, sometimes called cotton or souffle-style cheesecake, is airy and wobbly, closer to a chiffon cake than to a pie filling.

• It has been called cheesecake for centuries.
• A major dictionary defines it as a cake.
• It is served, sliced and sold like a cake, and some styles are light and spongy.

The verdict

What it sounds like

The case for pie: crust plus custard

The pie side argues from ingredients and structure. Cambridge defines a cake as a sweet food made from flour, eggs, fat and sugar mixed together and baked. A classic cheesecake filling is soft cheese, eggs and sugar, usually with little or no flour, poured over a separate crust. That is not a cake batter.

It is, however, a custard. Custard is sweetened milk, cream or cheese thickened by cooking it with eggs. And a custard pie is defined as an uncooked custard mixture poured into a crust and baked together, which is exactly how most baked cheesecakes are made. Pumpkin pie belongs to the same family, and nobody calls pumpkin pie a cake.

How cheesecake is baked

The oven tells the same story. America's Test Kitchen groups cheesecake with creme brulee and flan as custard recipes whose success depends on a water bath, which lets these delicate desserts cook slowly and evenly. In its tests, starting the bath with boiling water gave cheesecake a smoother, more uniform texture than cold or room-temperature water.

Custards need that gentle treatment because a mixture thickened with eggs overcooks and curdles if it gets just a few degrees too hot. A typical cake batter goes into the oven with no water bath at all. Cheesecake gets handled like a custard because it is one.

Torte, tart or something else?

The argument is not only cake versus pie. Some bakers call baked cheesecake a torte, because eggs are its only leavening. Others call it a flan or a tart, and food writer Alan Davidson came down on the tart side.

Two styles muddy things further. No-bake cheesecake, set in the fridge on a cookie crumb base, is not baked at all, and Basque cheesecake skips the crust entirely and is essentially a burnt custard. Neither one behaves like a cake. If you are arguing about a slice of either, know which cheesecake you are holding before you start, or you will end up in equivocation, two people using one word for two different desserts.

The ruling

Cheesecake is a pie, specifically a custard pie, that happens to be named cake. The filling is a baked custard of cheese, eggs and sugar with little or no flour, it sits in a crust, and it is baked in a water bath like a custard. The cake side is right about the name and about how we serve it, and the light Japanese style is a genuine exception.

This is the same kind of fight as whether a tomato is a fruit or whether cereal is a soup: a structural definition on one side, a familiar name on the other. Call it cheesecake and nobody will be confused. If the birthday table cannot let it go, paste both sides into the argument judge.