Holiday Food Fight: Pie Is Better Than Cake

Cake is delicious. It’s great for birthdays, anniversaries, and eating your feelings. I’ll never turn down a slice, and I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum. But I hear this debate a lot and honestly, I’m disappointed how many of you don’t understand that pie, in all its beautiful and mysterious forms, is objectively better than cake. It drives me nuts. And so, in honor of the holiday spirit and all the family fights it’s about to cause, I thought I’d outline in small words why you’re wrong.

Sponge cake, what we Westerners think of when we think of cake, is a nervous breakdown baked into rigidity. Flour and sugar mixed into frothy eggs always on the edge of collapse, cake is what happens when you want something sweet but even worse for you than cookies. It’s a sugary void, empty of substance and nutritional value, assuming it’s not covered in a dense layer of marzipan and turned into a decorative brick. Desperate reality show contestants make cake look like other, less appetizing things for empty-eyed TV personalities. Sponge cake wasn’t invented in France but it feels French, and their Revolution was probably led by kitchen maids tired of whipping eggs into foam using birch twigs. It’s a dessert for aristocrats destined for the guillotine. Light, airy, and usually dominated by a frosting layer so thick it could be used as mortar.

Pie, by comparison, is the original egalitarian baked good. It dates back thousands of years, at least to ancient Egypt. The crust can be delicate and flaky enough to require a pan, or sturdy enough to support the pie on its own. Savory ingredients like beef, chicken, and vegetables mean pie is can be a meal and dessert. Ever had steak cake for dinner? I didn’t think so. Fill a pie crust with omelet ingredients, and you’ve created a quiche appropriate for both dinner parties and 2am hunger pangs. Turn Thanksgiving leftovers into a killer pot pie. Color the dough with turmeric and fill it with spiced beef before folding it over and baking, and you’ve got a Jamaican beef patty better than any birthday cake.

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Pie is also the perfect fruit delivery device. Jam or citrusy custard can be placed between cake layers or worked into frostings but they’re typically additions, rather than the focus of the dish — carrot and apple cakes being obvious exceptions. But there’s something special about a pie loaded with native fruit. There’s nothing like a cold slice of blueberry pie in summer, or hot apple pie and scoop of ice cream when the days get shorter. Pie lends itself to eating locally and in season, while cake is just cake all year long.

To be fair, American innovation made cake a lot easier than it used to be and I think that’s where a lot of its appeal comes from. Invented in the 1930s and perfected for the 1950s American housewife, ready-made cake mixes are cheap, tasty, and nearly idiot-proof. It’s hard to argue against spending a few dollars on a box of Duncan Hines yellow cake mix, whipping in vegetable oil, water, and eggs, and topping the resulting sheet cake with chocolate frosting. There’s nothing to stop me from sitting down with a glass of milk and a fork and demolishing the whole thing in one sitting except the fear my wife will catch me halfway through. And a properly cooked pie is a real challenge! Who can forget the best meme of Thanksgiving 2021, when a woman named Sharon Weiss turned Marie Callender’s pumpkin pie into Bill Paxton’s character from Near Dark?

But that just means pie baking, like most things, requires practice to do well. I get it. Modern cake is as cheap and easy, like me in college. But pie is more satisfying. More filling in both the figurative and literal sense. Accepting it now will let you face the holidays with dignity. If we all come to terms with it, maybe next year we can tackle how the crust and savory flavor means cheesecake is technically a pie. But we’re not there yet. Whatever you bake for it and however you celebrate it, enjoy your Thursday off!