Cornwall: Cornish Pasty

The basic Cornish pasty (or "pastie", an incorrect spelling that persists) is one of those traditional dishes that suffers, like many others, from being spuriously re-invented every generation or so by people who don't understand that it's just fine the way it is. Especially in pubs in London -- but also in fast food joints and supermarkets all over the United Kingdom -- you can and will find objects touted as "traditional Cornish pasties" which nonetheless contain ingredients that no self-respecting Cornishman or Cornishwoman would ever allow near them.

By "traditional" we mean the oldest and most basic form of the pasty, which contained meat (usually a cheap cut of steak), potatoes, turnip or swede/rutabaga, and onion, and nothing but salt and pepper to season it. It was a simple thing -- maybe almost too simple for modern tastes, as people see the recipe and start immediately getting the urge to tamper with it. (On seeing this kind of behavior, EuroCuisineGuy can usually be heard muttering in the background, "Let's not get all Heston Blumenthal on its butt. Just let the poor thing be a pasty.")

Historically, the basic Cornish pasty was a working man's dish -- the kind of thing you take down a tin mine with you, or out to the fields. The pastry keeps the contents contained and (for a while) hot: the ridged outer edge of the pastry lets you eat even if your hands are black with coal-dust -- you just get rid of the "handle" after you eat everything else. It was perfectly designed as a fast food of its time: an individual serving, handily packaged, and with no wrapping or waste to bring home or get rid of afterwards.

When the wives and sisters and mothers who made these pasties for their men felt like it -- and had the necessary ingredients on hand -- they did venture beyond the traditional meat/potato/turnip recipe, and got innovative with the pasty's structure as well. Larger-sized pasties were often made with different seasonings or ingredients at each end, then marked with a knife (or with letters made out of leftover pastry) to show the initials of the person for which each end of the pasty was meant. Or a savory meat mixture might be put at one side of the pasty, and a fruit / dessert mixture at the other side. (Something else to mention here: the myth that the pastry was meant to be thick and hard enough to survive being dropped down the shaft of a tin mine is just that -- a myth.)

The recipe we share below is for the most basic and traditional Cornish pasty. It's adapted from a recipe / method that appears in Cornish Recipes, Ancient and Modern, a pamphlet first issued by the Cornwall Federation of Women's Institutes in 1929. (Our copy is dated 1959, the pamphlet's 20th edition.) It also suggests some variations that were commonplace when the pamphlet was published.

Click "Read more" for the recipe and method.

To make the traditional Cornish meat and potato pasty:

First, make a batch of shortcrust pastry.

• 1 1/2 cups plain flour
• 1/4 - 1/3 cup lard or similar hard fat (Crisco can be substituted: you may need to use a couple of tablespoons more to produce a tender enough crust. Please note, however, that lard works best with this.)
• 1/8 tsp salt
• Cold water to mix (usually about 1/3 cup, but add more if necessary)

Cut the lard into the flour and salt with a pastry blender or two knives (or do it in the food processor). Slowly add the water and continue mixing until the pastry gathers into a ball. Knead gently for ten or twenty seconds and then set aside.

For the filling:

• About half a pound (or more) of chuck or skirt steak (Do not use hamburger. For this to be a real pasty, you need to chop the steak yourself: most hamburger / mince is chopped too fine and is the wrong texture.)
• 2 large potatoes, peeled
• 1/2 a large rutabaga / swede or turnip (rutabaga works better)
• 1 large onion
• Pepper and salt to taste
• Water to seal the mixture into the pastry

Chop the steak into approximately 1/4 inch cubes. Dice the potatoes and rutabaga or turnip. Chop the onion. Put everything together in a bowl and mix well. Season well with salt and pepper.

Roll out the pastry on a lightly floured surface into a round about the width of a dinner plate. Mound the filling in the middle of the pastry. Brush the exposed edges of the pastry with water. Fold the pastry in half, into a sort of half-moon shape, and fold the edges over, crimping them hard between thumb and forefinger to seal. Make at least one slit on the top (two or three small ones work best) so that the pasty can vent its interior steam while baking.

Preheat the oven to 225C / 450F. Put the pasty, slit side up, on a lightly greased (or nonstick) baking tray. Brush with beaten egg. Bake for 40-45 minutes. Before removing, check to make sure that the pasty's underside is brown and crisp.

Serve piping hot -- if possible, with a typical English brown sauce like HP.

Variations on the theme from our 1929 pamphlet:

RABBITTY PASTY: Use fleshy part of rabbit cut the same as meat, fairly small.

TURNIP PASTY: Turnips and potatoes, sometimes all turnip with a lump of butter or cream. Or fat bacon may be used.

MACKEREL PASTY: Allow one to two mackerel to each pasty, and clean and boil them in the usual way. Then remove skin and bones, and lay on pastry: fill up with washed parsley, and add pepper and salt.

HERBY PASTY: Prepare pastry as for ordinary pasty. Well wash equal quantities of parsley, bits [an unidentifiable local herb found only in North Cornwall], shallots, half quantity spinach, prepare some slices of bacon cut into small pieces and an egg well beaten. Pour boiling water over the parsley, bits and spinach that have been cut into small portions, and let stand for half an hour, well squeeze all moisture out. Put on pastry with the shallots cut finely and the bacon, pinch up the edges of pasty allowing a small portion left open for the egg to be added, finish pinching and bake.

STAR-GAZING PASTY: [A variant on another famous Cornish dish, "Stargazy Pie", in which the fish heads look out at you from under the pie crust, around the edges of the pie.]

"Mawther used to get a herring, clean 'un, and put same stuffin' as what yow do have in mabiers (chicken); sew 'un up with niddle and cotton, put 'en in some daugh made of suet and flour; pinch the daugh up in the middle and lave the heid sticking out one end, and tail t'other. They was some nice pasties, too, cooked in a fringle fire with crock and brandis and old furzy tobs."

Other variants also mentioned in the cookbook (essentially, just cut the ingredients up and put them in the pasty): apple with cinnamon and brown sugar (and sometimes blackberries as well): broccoli; chicken; dates; jam; pork; rice; parsley and lamb.

The cookbook also notes: "It is said that the Devil has never crossed the [River] Tamar into Cornwall, on account of the well-known habit of Cornishwomen of putting everything they met into a pasty, and he was not sufficiently courageous to risk such a fate." And they quote the well-known poem which describes the basic pasty structure:

"Pastry rolled out like a plate,
Piled with 'turmut, tates, and mate',
Doubled up and baked like fate,
That's a 'Cornish Pasty'."

(Note: there are a few US-based firms making traditional (and many other) pasties. One standout is the Cornish Pasty Company of Tempe, AZ, who produce at least one genuine Cornish pasty (they call theirs the "Oggie", a word sometimes used as a dialect name for the pasty, though properly it refers to a different pastry...) before branching off into numerous varieties and flavors that would probably have given a traditional Cornishperson a cardiac arrest.)

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