User:Dcclark/Pasty

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A pasty from Cornwall

A pasty or pastie is a type of pie, originally from Cornwall, United Kingdom. It is a baked pastry case traditionally filled with diced meat and vegetables. The ingredients are uncooked before being placed in the unbaked pastry case. Pasties with traditional ingredients are specifically named Cornish pasties. Traditionally, pasties have a semicircular shape, caused by folding a circular pastry sheet over the filling. One edge is crimped to form a seal. A Devon pasty is a pasty whose crimp is at the top of the crust rather than the side.

Pasty is not pronounced as if it had to do with paste, but rather as IPA /ˈpæsti/, /ˈpɑːsti/, or something similar, depending on dialect.

Oggy is a slang term for a pasty which is used often in Cornwall.

Ingredients

While there are no completely standard pasty ingredients, almost every traditional recipe includes beef mince (ground beef) or skirt steak, finely sliced onion, and potato. Other common ingredients include swede (rutabaga), parsley, and carrot. The presence of carrot in a store-bought pasty is usually an indication of inferior quality. Some traditional stories claim that one part of a pasty would contain fruit, although the truth of this is uncertain.

Today, pasty contents vary, especially outside of Cornwall. Common fillings include beef steak and stilton, chicken and ham, cheese and vegetable and even turkey and stuffing. Other specialty pasties include breakfast and vegetarian pasties. Pasty crust recipes also vary. Traditional recipes call for a tough (not flaky) crust, which could withstand being held and bumped in the Cornish tin mines. There is a great deal of debate among pasty makers about the proper traditional ingredients and recipes for a pasty, specifically the mixture of vegetables and crimping of the crust.

Pasties were traditionally eaten as a complete meal, with the vegetable and meat juices acting as a form of gravy. Nowadays, pasties are often served with gravy or ketchup as a dressing.

History

The origins of the pasty are largely unknown. It has been conjectured that the pasty originated in Cornwall, or may have been brought by invading Vikings. However, by the 1800's, pasties had evolved to meet the needs of Cornish tin miners, as tin mining was a major Cornish industry at the time. Tradition claims that the pasty was originally made as lunch ('croust' in the Cornish language) for Cornish miners who were unable to return to the surface to eat.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 (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 knockers, capricious spirits in the mines who might otherwise 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 could stay warm for 8 to 10 hours and, when carried close to the body, helped the miner stay warm. In such pasties meat and each vegetable would each have its own pastry "compartment," 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 part 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.

Pasties are still very popular throughout Devon and Cornwall, and also in the rest of the United Kingdom. Pasties in these areas are usually hand-made and sold in bakeries or (less often) specialist pasty shops. They are also sold in supermarkets, but these are mass produced and often taste entirely different from traditional Cornish pasties. Several pasty shop chains have also opened up in recent years, selling pasties that are more traditional than the common mass-produced varieties while still offering novel fillings. It is common in some areas for pasties to be eaten "on-the-move" from the paper bag they are sold in, making them essentially a fast food.

A pasty from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan

Cornish miner immigrants helped to spread pasties into the rest of the world, in the 19th century. As tin mining in Cornwall began to fail, miners brought their expertise and traditions to new mining regions. As a result, pasties are very common in Nevada County, California, parts of Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In these areas, pasties are now a major tourist draw. Pasties in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan have a particularly unusual history, as a small influx of Finnish immigrants followed the Cornish miners, in 1864. These Finns (and many other ethnic groups) adopted the pasty for use in the Copper Country copper mines. About 30 years later, a much larger flood of Finnish immigrants found their countrymen baking pasties, and assumed that it was a Finnish invention. As a result, the pasty has become strongly associated with Finnish culture in this area.

Pasties are also found in South Australia (particularly the Yorke Peninsula). Most country bakeries in South Australia produce pasties, as well as large brandnames such as Balfour's and Vili's. They may also be found in the Mexican city of Pachuca, and are commonly served with different ingredients, such as jalapeño peppers.

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.

Cultural references

A traditional Cornish tale claims that the devil knew of Cornishwomen's propensity for putting any available food into pasties, and would never dare to cross the River Tamar into Cornwall for fear of ending up as a pasty filling.

The earliest known literary reference to pasties appears in an Arthurian romance by Chretien de Troyes from the 1100's, set in Cornwall and written for the Countess of Champagne. This work includes the line: "Next Guivret opened a chest and took out two pasties. 'My friend,' said he, 'Now try a little of these cold pasties ...' " References to pasties later occur in various Robin Hood stories of the 1300's.

There are references to pasties in three of Shakespeare's plays. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 1 Scene 1 the Page says "Wife, bid these gentlemen welcome. Come, we have a hot venison pasty to dinner: come gentlemen, I hope we shall drink down all unkindness". In All's Well That Ends Well, Act IV Scene III, Parrolles states: "I will confess to what I know without constraint: if ye pinch me like a pasty, I can say no more". Finally, in Titus Andronicus, Titus bakes Chiron and Demetrius's bodies into a pasty, and forces their mother to eat them.

See also

• Empanada
• Calzone
• Turnover (food)
• Knish

External links

• History of the Pasty: "The easiest way to describe a pasty, is a pot pie without the pot..."
• Pasties in Michigan's Upper Peninsula: Foodways, Interethnic Relations, and Regionalism, by Yvonne R. Lockwood and William Lockwood
• Pasties in Wisconsin, by Dorothy Hodgson
• Detailed recipe for making Cornish Pasty
• Recipes, and history of the pasty in "Pasties, Plain and Simple" by Ken Anderson
• Comprehensive recipe for an authentic Cornish pasty including pictures showing the process.