You call that a pastry?

Saucyman – Is a cake a pastry? Technically what is a pastry? La Patisserie

Ah, the gray area of dessert, where the crust meets the crumb…Boston Cream Pie is actually a cake. As Saucyfriend, Ydna Swartz points out, cheesecake with its two components of crust and filling is actually more like a pie than a cake. This is especially true considering the cream cheese filling is custard, akin to pumpkin pie. Are butter-rich scones pastry or cake? What about shortcake – not really a cake at all given the insane amounts of baking powder and butter? Then what about pancakes, which despite having cake in the title along with flour, eggs and sugar are not generally thought of as cake. Ladyfingers? Madeleine(s)? Teacakes, which are sometimes cookie-like or sometimes yeasted, but not always cakey? Where does it all end?

Perhaps the confusion was fated by the endless results that can be achieved by combining flour, eggs, salt, sugar and liquid with heat. Maybe it is because the word pastry evolves from a cognate of the Latin, pastaierie - while cake is evolved/co-opted from the Germanic-Scandinavian languages, whose different foodstuffs allow for some overlap between the two words. Dictionaries and Etymologies are little use besides telling us that the word pastry derives from paste and shares a common linguistic ancestor with the word/food pasta.

We’ll let another Saucyfriend, Michael Dickman take a crack at this. Michael studied words and how they go together, first at the University of Oregon (Go Ducks), then like his twin, Matthew, he received an advanced degree at UT Austin (Hook’em Horns) examining poetry. Longtime friend, a lover of words, food and other people’s good and usually expensive liquor – it is a poet thing (I have never taken a poetry class, let alone an advanced one but I am willing to believe that there is a credit or two to be had in identifying good booze). Michael earns his share of drink by volunteering on the Saucyman Usage Committee (unfortunately, The SUC) and explains here why cake is not a pastry -

Cake is not a pastry. Sad but true, no matter how small or how cute or how much you found it on a trip to Paris in the smallest and cutest PASTRY shop you had ever seen. Even though the Parisian proprietress was nice to you (and for the record Parisians are genuinely nice and giving people despite the American tradition of thinking them cruel and snobbish). It's still cake. Wrap it in glaze and chocolate plastic and smooth it out and it's still cake. Most of the eating and writing folks on my bookshelves take the time to separate cakes from pastry even in passing, such as this from James Beards' wonderful book, Delights and Prejudices:

"Pastry and cakes were not really my mother's forte, but Let (her chef) taught her how to produce certain typically English cakes. A good poundcake was one of these...Another of these cakes was seedcake. No tea table, in my opinion, is complete without a good seedcake."

Besides social semantics, the ingredients of the two, or rather the proportions are too different to be lumped together. In pastry, the large amount of fat and the fact that there is hardly any liquid in relation to the flour produces something flaky and often crispy. Not bouncy or springy like cake.

Here is what Harold McGee has to say:

"Pastries bear little family resemblance to cakes or breads or pastas. They're a very different expression of the nature of the wheat grain. In making other dough and batter foods, we use water to fuse the particles of wheat flour into an integrated mass of gluten and starchy granules, and further knit that mass together with cooking. By contrast, pastry is an expression of the fragmentary, discontinuous, particulate qualities of wheat flour."

So, there: Take that you science geeks.

-Michael Dickman

Although, I am still a little confused why pastry shops sell lots and lots of cakes and why Pastry Chefs bake them, I agree a cake is a cake and a pastry is a pastry. My reasoning differs a little from Misters Dickman and McGee, I defer to the great Rose Levy Beranbaum, whose monumental volumes, The Cake Bible and The Pie and Pastry Bible separate baked items into two camps. Pancakes & crepes are found in the Cake Testament and Scones are found in the Pastry Scroll and that is good enough for me.

Thanks to Michael, brother Carl and my Sister in Common-law for their help and input with word and definition week. Saucyman returns from the holiday weekend on Tuesday with the hows and whys of the freakish looking buddah’s hand citrus, later in the week we check the newspapers and internets to see what is happening in the world of food and close out the week answering yet another question about the world of food and drink.