But it is delicious.

Cheesecake may be some kind of tart in some circumstances, but it is most certainly neither a pie nor a proper cake.

My take is if it has a crust, it's pie. Most of the cheesecake I've had used a graham-cracker crumb crust, so that would qualify. If there's no crust, I suppose it would be a pudding, not a cake since cake has baking soda and flour in it to make it airy and light, not a homogeneous gel like cheesecake has. But nothing says food has to be logical.

I vote for pie. It's a flourless liquid, baked to a custard in a crumb crust... so the same concept as, say, a Key lime pie.

Argh, LJ ate my comment! :(

Basically, my thinking goes like this: Cheesecake has cake in its name. It is presented like cake: with extra adornments and decorations, fussy, fancy, and often pretentious. But it has a crust, like pie! It is served in one tier, like pie! BUT! Etc. etc.

So much for my prediction about apple, huh?

How can it be pie? It has no lid. It's only pie in the weebl and bob any-desert-I-like-is-pie sense.

I have a similar dilemma with Boston cream pie.

Cheesecake is cheesecake. Pie and cake have to be baked; not all cheesecakes are baked.

Pie is primarily savoury anyway. *g* Ask Mrs Miggins.

Truly, you are now the spiritual leader of the Great Pie Debate. ;)

I haven't felt enthused enough to organize a pie-off here since everyone (except Adam) agrees with me. ("Top crust only? What the hell kind of pie is that?") I need to find some olde worlde diaspora. Otherwise it would just be sitting around and eating a bunch of pie.)

My admittedly idiosyncratic definition of a pie includes pastry, of which cheesecake has none, meaning it is not a pie. I believe that, like the easily-resolved Jaffa Cake debate, there is some clue to the cheesecake's nature in its name. :)

Pies are supposed to have pastry (preferably on top as well as the bottom, otherwise it's encroaching on the territory of the tart). I'm not convinced that the biscuit-crumb base of a cheesecake is sufficiently pastrylike to qualify it for piehood. I therefore voted "cake", which can apply to pretty much any solid substance.

Pies have pastry tops, cakes don't. If a cheesecake is anything (other than a cheesecake, it's a flan.

Or a Tart.

It's a custard pie, like pumpkin pie. I'm going on preparation method for that vote. You make the shell, you pour the custard in, you bake it.

I am not convinced by the "but it isn't pastry" or "there's no top crust" arguments. There's no top crust on a pumpkin pie, and even on fruit pies it's optional (it's so not-structurally important that people do crazy decorative things with the top crust on a pie all the time). And crumb crusts are an absolutely acceptable variation on pie crust lining, especially for custard pies: I have never seen a peanut butter pie or a chocolate mousse pie made of pastry, for example.

I think to be a cake you have be a little breadlike, and cheesecakes are not at all so.

so much heresy!

http://isitpie.com/