Many readers of this article will be familiar with the Cornish Pasty. An iconic savoury pastry dish originally from Cornwall UK. Despite many people in Britain associating pasties with garage or take away food a real pasty is in fact a hand crafted delicious dish that follows certain rules.
The pasty has to be the single most controversial subject in Cornish culture. For decades now the debate has raged about the content and various crimping styles associated with Cornwall's best known dish. Most recently the ridiculous claim from our Devonian neighbours that the pasty was first eaten and created in Plymouth, caused wide spread annoyance . Ridiculous not because Cornwall was first in the creation of this iconic dish, ridiculous because in fact the pasty was widely eaten across Europe in various forms from the middle ages onwards and was not at all unusual.
Samuel Pepys was a fan as was King Henry III, often these early pasties were filled with eel, lamprey, salmon or venison and the King Henry is on record as demanding “salmon pasties as frequently and quickly ” as they were available . The actually origin of the word pasty seems to be from Norman French Pasteé, meaning resembling paste, perhaps referring to the non-edible pastry used in the middle ages to cover and protect the “innards” of pies and other dishes.
Edible pastry recipes were first imported from Italy in the late middle ages “inventing” the pies and associated dishes that we find today in so many forms. The origin of the word Oggy (dialect) or Hogen (in Cornish) according to the noted historian AK Hamilton Jenkin comes from a similar but distinct dish know has the Hoggan which in some ways resembles much more the early medieval pasty.
The hoggan would be made in the following way,a rough barley crust was rapped around a piece of “green” pork, cooked until it was it was rock hard. The meat therein would be cooked to perfection and could be kept warm for many hours, perhaps if you were working in the fields or down the mine this would be a very handy way to keep your food. The modern Cornish pasty seems to have come into existence some 200 years ago. Onion, turnip (suede if you must call it that) and potato became staples of the working man in Cornwall and if you also consider the rise in beef consumption across Britain at this time, you have the Cornish pasty as it is now. It is of considerable merit to Cornish pasty makers everywhere that these basic ingredients can be turned into something so delicious. There are of course many legends about our national dish that are often repeated, some of which are true and some not at all. For example. the old saying “the devil will not come into Cornwall for fear of being put into a pasty” is in fact first recorded as “the devil will not come into Cornwall for fear of being put into a pie”. The Cornish, apparently in 1828 were as equally pie mad as they were pasty mad, some of the traditional pie recipes I have researched over the years would rightly shock the modern pie eater. The story of the crust being used to by miners to hold the pasty to protect themselves from cyanide poisoning is also hard to prove, all historic photographs of miners see them eating their pasty from a rough sacking cloth or paper bag. If you have ever tried to eat a pasty while holding the crust you will see that it very quickly falls apart!
There is however significant evidence of the miners throwing parts of their pasties (and other food) to appease the “knockers” or mine spirits and it seems that the pasty with sweet at one end and meat at the other was a reality. Of course the pasty is now protected by the European Union, and so it should be. The craft it takes to make a really good one is no less than it has ever been and while there are people that can do so our national dish will stay firmly at the centre of Cornish culture.