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.