Cornish Pasty

Cornish Pasties

The Cornish Pasty (Pastie) is often linked to the lunch dish of Cornish miners. It was a complete meal of meat and vegetables wrapped and cooked in pastry. Each Pasty weighed about two pounds. The Cornish Pasties sold in the bakeries of Cornwall, Australia, USA, and South Africa weigh less.

2 lbs. finely chopped beef stew meat. Some mix beef and pork left-over meats
1 16oz. can peas, undrained
2 cups of chopped celery
2 cups of chopped carrots
2 cups of thin gravy. Heavy dark stout beer is my preferred alternative
2 well chopped medium onions
1-2 cups of dried potato flakes to thicken mixture after cooking. Some will include 2 cups of diced potatoes and then thicken with flour or cornstarch at the end of cooking.
3 tablespoons of Worcestershire Sauce.
Salt and pepper.

Bring the mixture to a boil in a cooking pot while stirring and then cover the pot and slow cook in the oven at 250 degrees for at least two hours. Remove and thicken with potato flakes and let cool. The mixture is thick enough when a dessert spoon stands upright in the mixture.

If you wish to make the traditional pasty, use 9-inch pie crusts, available in most supermarkets, and prepare a pasty as shown above. Over time I have moved to a less traditional approach that still gives portability to use in the lunch pail. I cook in heavy-duty non-stick 9X5 baking loaf pans. The pastry is made thick by using two 9-inch pie crusts and rolling them to stick them together and making them a little wider.

The pastry in then put in a pan rubbed with olive oil,  2 cups of the mixture, sealed with pastry on top  and given some breathing holes with a fork.

The sealed pasty loaf is then cooked in a preheated 400 degree oven for 50 minutes.

For the lunch pail, cut a pasty loaf in half and wrap in foil. As the center dish for the family meal serve one or two loaves and cut into individual servings. Often eaten cold, the pasty can be reheated. Some miners from previous centuries did reheat and placed their helmet candles under a shovel and heated the pasties on the shovel.

The pasty, as a portable complete meal, has a long and history. We know Shakespeare made reference to the pasty. With the demise of Cornwall mining in the middle of the 19th century, the miners took themselves, their mining skills, and their pasties worldwide. I grew up with pasties in Outback Queensland. The Cornish miners took the pasties to the upper Michigan Peninsula more than a century ago. May 24th is known, officially, as Michigan Pasty Day.

My first experience with the real Cornish Pasty was in the early Seventies when I spent a week backpacking along the Cornwall Coast Path alone. After taking a train as far west as I could, I found the Path as the sun was setting and set off hiking for a few hours with the aid of a flashlight. About 10 P.M. I left the Path away from the cliffs and crashing surf, and rolled out my sleeping bag beside a small pile of soil. I woke up at dawn, looked over pile of soil and saw a deserted mine shaft disappear down hundreds of feet. I stayed on the Path for the rest of the week.

Colcannon

Colcannon.

This recipe is Celtic in origin. The dish was brought to the United States by Irish immigrants escaping poverty and starvation. Colcannon is a low cost dish often served as a vegetable side dish.  The dish was often the complete meal for the lucky ones in the potato famine days in the 1800's in Ireland.

3 lbs. potatoes with skins on cut into eighths. Some prefer the potatoes mashed.

I small head of cabbage, cored and thinly sliced

2 chopped onions

1 cup of milk

1 cup finely chopped parsley or green onions

1/2 cup of olive oil or 2 tablespoons of butter

1 cup of bacon or ham bits or add three cups of ham in one inch pieces and make it a single dish meal

Salt and pepper to taste

2 TBS of Worcestershire sauce or 3 TBS Outback Al's Sauce

Place ingredients in covered casserole dish or Dutch Oven and bake for 40 minutes at 350. Serve with grated cheese of your choosing.

A traditional Irish song "Colcannon" has the following lyrics.

Lyrics for "Colcannon" also known as "The Skillet Pot."

Did you ever eat Colcannon, made from lovely pickled cream?


With the greens and scallions mingled like a picture in a dream.


Did you ever make a hole on top to hold the melting flake


Of the creamy, flavored butter that your mother used to make?

Chorus:

Yes you did, so you did, so did he and so did I,

and the more I think about it sure the nearer I'm to cry.

Oh, wasn't it the happy days when troubles we had not,


and our mothers made Colcannon in the little skillet pot

See the following web site for more lyrics and music: http://sniff.numachi.com/pages/tiCOLCANON;ttCOLCANON.html


A common theme through much of the family cooking across time and cultures was the cast iron cooking pot and lid. In America they are  known as "Dutch Ovens" and were used by Lewis and Clark in the Northwest in 1804-1806. In Ireland they were "Skillet Pots" and in Australia they are "Camp Ovens." The picture above is a "Skillet Pot."

Australian Outback Rissoles

                Australian Outback Rissoles.

Very low cost and very tasty . Served with eggs for breakfast and with vegetables for lunch and dinner. Great served cold as left-overs or on sandwiches.

1 and 1/2 lbs. of ground beef.

I large onion or 2 medium onions finely chopped.

2 cups of bread crumbs

 4 TBS of Worcestershire sauce

1 cup finely chopped parsley

1 cup of well beaten eggs with salt and pepper mixed in.

Optional:  1 cup of shredded cheese. 1 cup of shredded cabbage. 1 cup of chopped tomatoes. 1 cup of rice. 1 cup of left-over mashed potatoes, vegetables, finely chopped, such as carrots or beans. Use more than one of these options and you will not have a main meat dish.

Mix very well in a bowl. Make into six (6) very large patties or meat balls  using a cup of ingredients for each or make 12 smaller patties using a 1/2 cup for each. For some the large rissoles would be “mini meat loaves.” Typically each patty is rolled into a ball and then rolled in flour or bread crumbs and pressed flat to about 1 inch of thickness. They are not cooked or served thin as in hamburger patties. The smaller ones can be used as meatballs with pasta and a tomato sauce.

Cook in a frying pan or cast iron skillet with some olive oil and turn over until well browned on both sides. Cooking typically takes about 25 minutes. Cooking is done when the inside juices  start coming out. These are great on a grill brushed with barbecue sauce as they cook. Using the large size rissoles and cutting them in half as individual servings, keeps them moist for reheating as left-overs. The six large rissoles in the photo below were oven-baked for 40 minutes at 350 degrees.

 I watched my grandmother cook rissoles many times. To call this dish “economical” would be an understatement. Only the cheapest meat was used. This was shin beef or “the shank.” This meat is tough because of the connective tissue and was the cheapest cut of meat available. When the meat came home I would be assigned to the hand meat grinder on the kitchen table next to the wood stove. The onion would be mixed with the meat as it went through the grinder. This did away with the need to finely chop the onion. Other leftovers such as old cheese, cabbage or tomatoes were also fed though the meat grinder. Most of the ingredients came from the home garden or from grandmother’s chickens. The bread crumbs were from old bread that was heated dry in the oven and made into crumbs with a rolling pin.  A tablespoon of lard from the pot on the wood stove was placed in the cast iron frying pan before cooking the patties. A relatively modest amount of very cheap meat generated a large amount of tasty food.

 "How do you pronounce  rissole?"

The Oxford Dictionary notes:

                                                                                      Pronunciation: rissole (ris-sole) noun

• a compressed mixture of meat and spices, coated in breadcrumbs and fried.

Folks who asked the question used an Italian approach "ri-sol- i" with the emphasis on the final "i."

One of the first USA references to rissoles is the 1832 Boston cookbook "The Cook's Own Book." This book used the Oxford pronunciation and a recipe very similar to the one above. The rissole recipe has changed little over time and geography. The 1832 "receipt" for for beef rissoles states:
"Chop finely a pound of lean beef and a quarter of a pound of beef suet; pond them in a marble mortar; mix with it a quarter of pound of grated bread, a little onion and a head of garlic bruised; season with salt and pepper; bind it with three eggs well beaten; make it into small cakes, fry them to a light brown, and stew them in gravy for fifteen or twenty minutes." page 16.

If you need more information, the website Answers.com is very helpful and includes:

Variations by country

In Portugal, rissoles are known as rissóis (singular "rissol") and are a very popular snack that can be found in many cafes and in barbecues and house parties. Rissóis are a breaded pastry shaped as half-moon usually filled with fish or shrimp in béchamel sauce and then deep fried. Very frequently minced meat is used too. 

In Brazil they are often filled with sweetcorn, cheese or chicken.

The Australian rissole is generally made from minced meat without a pastry covering, but sometimes with breadcrumbs.

The New Zealand rissole is much the same as the Australian rissole but may contain diced yellow onion and cooked on a barbecue as a healthier option during summer.

Rissoles are a snack food in Indonesia, where they are called risoles (pronounced 'riss-o-lez'). They are commonly filled with vermicelli noodles and eaten with Indonesian soy sauce (kecap), chilli sauce or chilli padi.

Fried rissoles are common in southern Ireland, especially in the county of Wexford, where potato is boiled, mashed, mixed with herbs and spices, battered or bread crumbed, and served with chips (French-fries), and/or chicken or battered sausages.

Rissoles are sold in chip shops in south Wales and north-east England. Rissole and chips is a common choice of meal. These rissole are meat (typically corned beef) mashed up with potato, herbs and sometimes onion. They are coated in breadcrumbs or less frequently battered and deep fried.

In France, rissoles are served as a dessert cooked in the Savoy region. They are made of pears in batter and are baked, not fried.

Pioneer Family


I was the decedent of pioneer stock. George Hofmeister settled in the Springsure Area. George Married Caroline of the Stackelroth family who came from Germany via London on the sailing ship Coromandel that landed in South Australia 12-01-1837.