Spicy pasties | Lamb recipes | Jamie magazine (2024)

FAQs

Does a real Cornish pasty have carrots? ›

It must only contain: Roughly diced (or minced) beef, sliced or diced potato, swede (or as some call it, turnip), onion, seasoning to taste (mainly salt & pepper – we're not telling your our secret seasoning!). Yes – you read that right... No carrots!

As mining boomed in Cornwall, pasties became a go-to meal for the miners' crib breaks; they were an all-in-one meal that could be taken down the mines and eaten without cutlery. The wives of Cornish miners would lovingly prepare these all-in-one meals to provide sustenance for their spouses.

No meat other than beef, and no vegetables apart from those listed can be used in the filling. There must be at least 12.5% beef and 25% vegetables in the whole pasty. All the ingredients must be uncooked when the pasty is assembled and then slowly baked to develop all that famous Cornish pasty taste and succulence.

However, another 14 per cent did get it right, as Graham describes, “the traditional way to eat a pasty is with the pasty held in a horizontal position and holding the crimp, starting with the filled pastry and working your way outwards.

There will always be great debate about the origin of the pasty, but one easy way to detect the Devon pasty from the Cornish is that the Devon pasty has a top-crimp and is oval in shape, whereas the Cornish pasty is semi-circular and side-crimped along the curve.

Here's an ancient illustration of it where the pencil title calls it Boletus betulinus. I check the modern scientific name and it's apparently called Fomitopsis betulina now.

Pasties get a bit of a bad rep for being unhealthy, but in reality, they're a fairly good complete meal. Now, we're not recommending you eat one EVERY day, but you certainly shouldn't feel bad when you do reach for one. Or two! In fact, calories aren't a particularly good gauge of how healthy foods are for us.

A Cornish pastie is a meat pie that was a common lunch for Cornish miners. They can be found regionally, usually anywhere immigrants from Cornwall settled. When we lived up in Midland, Michigan the ladies from one of the local churches would make pasties and sell them for lunch.

Cornish pasties are made of simple ingredients which makes them much healthier than other fast food. It is stuffed with real vegetables, not just lettuce leaves and tomatoes as in fast food burgers. The swede fillings are enriched with calcium which is good for building the bone.

Because it is made from pastry dough. Pastry dough (and any other kind of dough) gets ruined by a microwave.

Is the Cornish Pasty illegal? ›

Since 2011, the Cornish Pasty has enjoyed protected status under Protected Food Names legislation; so only a pasty made to a specific recipe in Cornwall can be called a “Cornish Pasty”.

There are five main types of pastry dough for creating pastries: flaky, shortcrust, puff, choux and filo. All of them are made primarily from flour, water and fat. However, these five types of pastry dough each have slightly different core ingredients, different ratios of ingredients and, ultimately, different uses.

For instance with your choice of potato (with a pasty mine would be mash), choice of vegetable, peas for instance, and definitely gravy or the whole thing may be just to dry to enjoy. Pasty and chips (French Fries to non Brits) again with gravy would also be good….

You can eat them as one hand meals or pour ketchup or gravy on them and eat them that way. My grandpa told me he likes to cut pasties in half, eat them by hand and, add salt and ketchup and take a bite.

You should buy them red hot, never lukewarm or cold (cold, most commercial pasties taste like a pocket of wet cardboard filled with under-seasoned slurry).

Traditionally, pasties were made with different fillings at each end. One end containing meat and vegetables, and one end with a sweet filling. The sweet end would be marked with an initial so the miners knew what side to eat first. Today, Cornish pasties are filled with steak, potatoes, swede (rutabaga) and onions.

No debate here: carrots are "sacrilege" as the Cornish Pasty Association points out: the swede adds all the sweetness this dish needs. Older recipes tend to be vague on exact details but potatoes should be waxy, as the CPA makes clear, rather than the floury ones Mark Hix uses, so they keep their shape when cooked.

Pasties date back as far as the 13th century, at which time they were a pie baked without a dish of French origins, with a rich filling of venison, veal, beef, lamb or seafood, gravy and fruit. The name pasty is a mutation of the Medieval French “paste”, for pie.

These Cornish Pasties are filled with a mixture of well-seasoned steak, onions, potatoes and swede (or rutabaga/yellow turnip if you're in the US). The meat and vegetables are placed in the pastry raw, with a really good pinch of salt and pepper and a few dots of butter, then sealed and cooked in the pastry.