Cornish pasty: Encyclopedia II - Cornish pasty - History

Cornish pasty - History

By the 1800s the pasty had evolved to meet the needs of tin miners, as tin mining was a major Cornish industry at the time. Tradition claims that it was originally made as lunch ('croust' in the Cornish language) for Cornish miners who were unable to return to the surface to eat.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 (possibly including some arsenic often found with tin), 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 supposed to appease the capricious spirits in the mines, the knockers, who otherwise might lead miners into danger. A related tradition holds that it is bad luck for fishermen to take pasties to sea.

The pasty's dense, folded pastry stayed hot until lunchtime and, when carried close to the body, helped the miner stay warm. In such pasties meat would normally 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, marking the customer's initials with raised pastry. This practice was started because the miners used to eat one half of their pasty for breakfast and leave the remaining half for lunch, meaning that a way to identify the pasties was needed. Some mines kept large ovens to keep the pasties warm until mealtime. It is said that a good pasty should be strong enough to endure being dropped down a mine shaft.

For centuries the Cornish have been filling pasties with a wide variety of fillings. In 1985 a group of Young Farmers in Cornwall spent 7 hours making a record-breaking pasty - over 32ft long. This was believed to have been beaten in 1999 when bakers in Falmouth made their own giant pasty during the town's first ever pasty festival.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki