Okay. Hijack, but I’m genuinely interested in the answer.
I just made the world’s most perfect cheesecake. It’s creamy and dense and could only be defined as “cake” in the broadest sense of the word. I topped it with raspberries. Would it be considered a pudding?
Sez you, you bloody redcoat!
Oh, and pudding is a thick sweet custard.
I know what an American pudding is, Guin. An English pudding looks like this.
No, no, thrice no! Custard is custard!
Oh dear, and that’s something else I haven’t eaten for a long time. I foresee a bit of a fat-fest coming up shortly.
Bah, now i’ve gone and exposed my utter London-ness. Curses! I’ll have to tell the gang in my weekly candle-scenting class this… 
Anyway, what I *should * have said was that those were the sweet pies I liked. And I managed to miss out Banoffee, too, which surely is a gift from above if ever there was one. :smack:
Don’t forget Cottage pie!
What exactly do you mean by “collective”? We don’t say “I’m baking 3 pie for Thanksgiving” after all - the plural of pie is pies. I think you mean generality or generic rather than collective.
As people have mentioned we do eat savory pies in the US. Or some of us do, anyway. One of my favorite meals is beef and cheese pie with some sort of pasta on the side. However, we almost always qualify a meat based pie (“pork pie”, “turkey pot pie” etc), rather than call it “a pie”. And contrary to your assertions in this thread, obviously you do the same thing on the other side of the pond- call one sort of pie “pie” and qualify the other sort - or we wouldn’t have the discussion now about what the lizard meant when he said pie. You just call the other sort from us pie as a generic term.
However, I don’t think we use the generic pie as often as you’d suppose. A statement like “I think I’ll bring a pie to the potluck” is inevitably followed by the question “what sort of pie?” because even though the second person assumes it’ll be a fruit pie, the kind begs to be known. People who enjoy prolonged exchanges might choose to phrase it that way, but more succinct people usually cut to the chase and boldly state “I’m thinking of bringing a strawberry-rhubarb pie to the potluck.” Or maybe they wouldn’t, since they’d rather not be lectured on which parts of rhubarb are poisonous and which are eatable…
Around my parts in the US, savory pies are synonomous with Pot Pie. Otherwise a pie is understood to be a sweet or fruit pie.
Cheesecake is a custard pie. Ha.
I’m sorry, jjimm, but you’re only displaying your own ignorance here, you know.
For a start, Miss Purl McKnittington’s description of a cheeseburger pie is, mutatis mutandis, nothing more than a cottage pie, so far as I can see.
Secondly, we do have any number of variations on pies with a top and no bottom – savoury and sweet. The top can be potato, or shortcrust pastry, flaky pastry, suetcrust pastry, or … well, anything that works.
They may not be what you first think of when someone says “pie”, but they’re there, and they’re all pies.
Dammit, you beat me to the joke! 
This is how my father used to say kidneys were supposedly prepared (even though we’d never eaten them, but kids are big on bathroom humor and we always thought it was funny!).
You can guess how he claimed sausage casings were prepared.
No whoosh, just fact
One version (with crust), and without
Google has about 351,000 more if you are interested.
It’s not something to eat all the time, but every once in a while, it’s yummers.
And jjimm, if that ain’t a pie, then neither is shepherd’s pie.
Oh, and at Recipe Source, there are 972 recipes for dinner pies, and 2342 recipes for dessert pies.
BTW, jjim, “Bisquick” is a brand of baking mix. It has flour, baking soda, etc in it. So when you make the cheeseburger pie, it forms a crust. (At least that’s the theory. I have never made it)
Thing was, you see, that the mental picture it gave me was of someone going to McD’s or wherever, acquiring burger with cheese etc in a roll/bap, THEN somehow thinking "oh , I know, wouldn’t it be clever to take this home and go to the trouble of making pastry and … " yes, silly, but that’s why I thought there had to be a joke there somewhere. Because “burger” to me suggests the item itself, once made out of mince/ground beef … oooh no, my brain will hurt if I think more about it.
btw - I had been about to ask about the “Bisquick” stuff, but I see that one has been dealt with.
Man, if I ever get to visit the States, I shall be veryunambitious: when hungry and desirious of something to eat, I shall limit my requests to something like
“good morning, I should like to buy some food, please. Yes, thank you, food. Look, just sell me somethign I can eat, cos I don’t know any of its names, which are indeed legion”. “No, no no, why did you call for these men who arrive carrying a funy white coat?” :smack:
Well thank you very much. After reading this post, I found my my tired and cold medicine drugged brain trying to work out the details of creating
- Big Mac Wellington* which has got the be the biggest waste of synapse chemicals ever.
I thought you might not be aware of Bisquick, so I picked a couple of recipies that didn’t use it.
Now stop that! I now have coffee all over my 'puter. You come from the land of haggis and fried everything and you consider cheeseburger pie exotic? :eek:
I have been to many fancy restaurants in my time, but I don’t think I have ever seen a place serves fine Scotish cuisine. This is quite possibly because there is no such thing as fine Scotish cuisine.
The above was written with my toungue firmly in my cheek. It was a joke.
Yep, I don’t think most people think of cheeseburger pie when someone mentions “American food.” More like apple pie, southern fried chicken, hot dogs, hamburgers, french fries, etc.
Eee! Grease and horsemeat pie, with mushrooms.
This American had never heard of cheeseburger pie til reading this thread.
Sounds abominable.