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.

We are in the process of breaking these recipes out onto separate pages. Moved so far: