Cornish pasty
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A Cornish pasty or Cornish pastie is a type of pie, originating in Cornwall, United Kingdom. It is an oven-cooked pastry case traditionally filled with diced meat—nowadays beef mince (ground beef) or steak—potato, onion and swede (rutabaga). It has a semicircular shape, caused by folding a circular pastry sheet over the filling. One edge is crimped to form a seal. In Devon, a Devon Pasty is very similar but the crimp is at the top of the pasty rather than the side.
Today, pasty contents vary. Common fillings include beef steak and stilton, chicken and ham, cheese and vegetable and even turkey and stuffing.
Tradition claims that it was originally made as lunch ('croust', in the Cornish language) for Cornish miners who were unable to return to the surface to eat. The story goes that, covered in dirt from head to foot, they could hold the pasty by the folded crust and eat the rest of the pasty without touching it, discarding the dirty pastry. The pastry they threw away was also supposed to appease the capricious spirits in the mines, the knockers, who otherwise might lead miners into danger. In such pasties commonly meat would be at one end and a fruit filling at the other, separated by a pastry partition. Traditional bakers in former mining towns will still bake pasties with fillings to order, the customer's initials are marked on one half with raised pastry. This arose from miners taking large pasties to work in the mines, with one half eaten for breakfast and the remaining half left aside for lunch, to be identified by the initials. A related tradition holds that it is bad luck for fishermen to take them to sea.
Pasties are usually hand-made and sold in bakeries or (less often) specialist pasty shops. It is common for pasties to be eaten "on-the-move" from the paper bag they are sold in, making them essentially a fast-food.
They are still very popular throughout Devon and Cornwall but their availability is limited throughout the rest of the United Kingdom. Pasties are also sold in supermarkets, but these are mass produced and often taste entirely different from authentic Cornish pasties. Outside of the UK, they are also very common in Upper Michigan, USA where they were eaten in the same fashion by miners as described above and are now a significant tourist draw for the area.
Pasties can also be found in the Mexican city of Pachuca, where they are thought to have been introduced by emigrating English coal miners in the 19th century. They are commonly served with different ingredients, such as Jalapeņo peppers.
Pasty is not pronounced as if it had to do with paste, but rather as IPA //, //, or something similar, depending on dialect.
Oggy is a slang term for a Cornish pasty—see Oggy Oggy Oggy.
External links
- Pasties in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (http://accad.osu.edu/~dkrug/367/online/ethnicarts4/r_resources/reading/Lockwood.asp)