MMMMM----- Recipe via UNREGISTERED Meal-Master (tm) v8.02
 
      Title: Cornish Pasty
 Categories: British, Cornish, Pastry, Meats
      Yield: 4 servings
 
      1 lb Rump, chuck, or skirt steak
      5 oz Onion, chopped
      3 oz Turnip (swede), chopped
      8 oz Potato, peeled, sliced thin
           Salt, pepper, thyme
 
  "Make a firm pastry and roll out two dinner-plate circles, or four
  side-plate circles, according to whether you are feeding two ravenous
  people or four of moderate appetite.  Leave to chill, while you
  prepare the filling.
  
  "Cut all skin and gristle from the meat, and chop it.  There should
  be at least 10 oz of skirt, and rather more of better quality steak.
  
  "Season and layer the filling ingredients to one side of the pastry
  circles.  Or mix them together (traditions differ).  Brush edges with
  egg:
   flip over the pastry to form a half-moon shape, and twist the edges
  to give a rope effect.  Mark initials on the pastys, if you have
  varied the filling, in one corner.  Brush over with egg and make two
  small holes at the top for steam to escape.  Bake at 400F for 20
  minutes, then lower the heat to 350F for a further 40 minutes.
  Protect the pastry with butter papers or foil if they brown too fast.
  
  "...The pasty -- pronounced with a long ah as in Amen -- is Cornwall's
  most famous and most travestied dish.  Admittedly in times of
  poverty, its contents might be reduced to potatoes, or to parsley and
  an egg with a leek or two or a hint of bacon, but surely it never
  tasted as awful as the so-called Cornish pasties sold all over the
  country in supermarkets and cheap restaurants.  The pastry obviously
  had to be firm, because pasties were a packed lunch, for carrying to
  the mines, fishing boats or schools (though not so hard that the
  pasty could be dropped down a mineshaft without breaking -- an old
  joke).
  
  "At home, whatever might be put in a pasty on a working day, might
  come to the table in the form of a double-crust plate pie, or even
  without pastry at all -- steak, topped by turnip and potato, being
  layered into a pot and baked in the oven, a dish known as
  meat'n'under, or under roast.
  
  "Whatever other people do to it, the Cornish keep their love of
  pasties; and all over the world, where Cornish miners have gone to
  find work, you are likely to find pasties.  In the Upper Peninsula of
  Michigan, for example, other ethnic groups have taken to the pasty,
  and you get Finnish or Italian versions as well as the original
  Cornish kind.   They even keep the Cornish habit of marking initials
  on a corner of the crust, so that a half-eaten pasty can be left on a
  school bench, for example, and reclaimed by its owner after a fight
  or a game.  And so that each individual in a family can have the
  variation of filling that he or she likes best."
  
  (recipe and quote from THE OBSERVER GUIDE TO BRITISH COOKERY, Jane
  Grigson)
 
MMMMM

MMMMM----- Recipe via UNREGISTERED Meal-Master (tm) v8.02
 
      Title: Cornish Pasty II (Variations)
 Categories: Cornish, British, Meats, Pastry
      Yield: 8 servings
 
 
  The below are from CORNISH RECIPES, ANCIENT AND MODERN, a pamphlet
  cookbook issued by the Cornwall Federation of Women's Institutes.
  (The copy I have is dated 1959:  the first edition was published in
  April 1929: this edition is the 20th.)
  
  MEAT AND POTATO PASTY
  
  Always use fresh steak, potatoes cut small, salt and pepper, flavored
  with onion.
  
  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 far 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 (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 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'."
 
MMMMM