As German as apple cake

There's an urban legend that says Eskimos have dozens of words for "snow." Those of us in warmer climes are happy to believe that the density, texture, frequency, and fierceness of snow are so relevant to all aspects of daily life in the arctic that the locals must need a vocabulary that distinguishes snow varieties. Thus the legend propagates, even though it's inaccurate.

I have long been puzzled that there aren't more German words to distinguish different kinds of cakes, as the delectable 4 p.m. carb is pivotal to daily life in Germany. However, the many-words-for-snow story dispels the linguistic fallacy that different manifestations of things demand different words.

German has two words that answer the call of cake duty: Kuchen and Torte. Kuchen covers cakes and pies--"cake" involving no more than one layer of any individual kind of dough. Kuchen might be apples or cherries with sour cream custard in a tart crust (flour, butter, sugar, egg, baking powder); or a thin layer of tart crust under a layer of sponge cake, covered with a layer of fresh raspberries and gelatin; or a light cheesecake with apricots and marzipan spritzes on top.

In a conceptual leap that's beyond my American ability to understand, Kuchen also includes a range of both sweet and salty yeast dough concoctions, including Pflaumenkuchen (sugared plums on yeast dough), Zwiebelkuchen (onion sour-cream custard on yeast dough), and the generic Flammkuchen, which is kind of like a Badisch pizza.

Kuchen welcomes pie under its large umbrella because Germans don't do pie, don't recognize pie as an independent genre, and therefore call it cake.

Torte covers the concepts of tortes and tarts. Tortes generally involve multiple layers of one kind of cake, separated with cream or fruit filling--except when a Torte is a tart. A small Torte gets a diminutive rendering, as in Obsttoertchen (fruit tartlet). Because German tarts often include a layer of sponge cake, if an Obsttoertchen is big enough, it can be a Kuchen rather than a Torte.

I am able to report all of this after years of extensive first-hand experience. Fortunately, you don't have to know what something is called as long as you can point to it through a display window.