The fillings were varied and rich; venison, beef, lamb and seafood like eels, flavoured with rich gravies and fruits. And so the humble Cornish Pasty was born. A typical pasty is simply a filling of choice sealed within a circle of pastry, one edge crimped into a thick crust.
A good pasty could survive being dropped down a mine shaft! The crust served as a means of holding the pasty with dirty hands without contaminating the meal. Arsenic commonly accompanies tin within the ore that they were mining so, to avoid arsenic poisoning in particular, it was an essential part of the pasty. The traditional recipe for the pasty filling is beef with potato, onion and swede, which when cooked together forms a rich gravy, all sealed in its own packet!
As meat was much more expensive in the 17th and 18th centuries, its presence was scarce and so pasties traditionally contained much more vegetable than today. The presence of carrot in a pasty, although common now, was originally the mark of an inferior pasty. Filling ideas are endless however, and can be as diverse as your taste will take you. There is much debate as to whether the ingredients should be mixed together before they are put in the pasty or lined up on the pastry in a certain order, with pastry partitions.
However, there is agreement that the meat should be chopped not necessarily minced , the vegetables sliced and none should be cooked before they are sealed within the pastry. What you might not realise, however, is that the origins of the pasty go back at least eight centuries! First documented in the 13 th Century, under the reign of Henry III, bakers in Norwich were accused of reheating three day old pasties and selling them on to make a profit.
Pasties then continued to cause a bit more trouble for the pastry-makers. In , a ban was put in place in London to prevent shops selling their rabbit and pastry concoctions for more than a penny! Despite these pasties being assembled a little differently than to how you would expect today, it did allow people to discover that meat could be wrapped up inside the pastry this way.
After the third mining boom in the 18th century, the Cornish mining industry was flourishing. Some of the areas, such as Gwennap and St Day, were among the richest in the world and, at its height, the tin mining industry in Cornwall owned around steam engines. Men going into the mines needed a transportable, yet filling, lunch option that they could take with them.
Known as the first convenience food, the filling would often consist of a potato and vegetable filling. The mixture placed in the middle of the pastry would be made very cheaply, but would be highly calorific to provide the miners with the energy that they needed to get through the day. It was the thick, pastry casing that made it so easy for people to carry with them, as well as the shape, which was the right size for hands to hold. It is thought that the miners gave the pasty its distinctive D shape too — the crust became a handle, which was discarded to prevent contaminating the food with grubby, possibly arsenic-ridden hands.
Others will dispute this, arguing that miners ate their pasties wrapped in muslin or paper bags so that they could enjoy every last bit, as we do today.
For many families, pasty-making was a daily task and recipes were passed from mothers to daughters, rarely written down.
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