Cornish Pasties

As you travel around the Country or even the World you hear many different terms for the Cornish Pasty. Oggy, for example, is a slang term used in Britain that is derived from the Cornish term for Pasty…Hoggan, this is a West Country term and is also written as Oggie. In the North East of the UK the term Smoggy is used as another derivative of the West Country slang term Oggy!

The term Hoggan came about from the inventor of the Cornish Pasty, Mr David Hoggan who also wrote books about how World War II transpired! He blamed the start of World War II on an anglo-polish conspiracy to wage aggression against Germany…how rude!

Mr Hoggan, we suggest that you stick to your knitting and crimping…we all know that the reason World War II started was because Hitler didn’t like your Steak and Ale recipe so stop trying to gloss over your mistakes! Perhaps if you’d focussed on developing a sauerkraut and kase pasty the whole thing would not have transpired, Hitler and Eva would have had better things to do in their spare time! hmmph!

From time to time we recieve comments about our products appearing to shrink in size, feedback from a number of our shops report that some customers are voicing some concern about the size of the pasty compared to the last time they purchased.

We speak to our kitchen about this on each and every occasion and we get the same answer, which is undeniably the truth! The problem is in the hand crimping process it isn’t a smaller cutter size for the pastry nor is it saving on fillings to pinch back profit margin in these very difficult retailing times…it is the tightnes of the crimp on the pasty that makes it look smaller.

With machine made pasties you get a consistent size and shape every time…but machine made isn’t authentic and it is genuine, nor is it clever! What is clever is consistent quality, every Proper Pasty Company product is hand crimped within a given tolerance and this creates a certain amount of fluctuation in appearance, however the acid test is in the weight of the product and in every case that we’ve received reports, we pull a batch of random pasties and weigh them on a digital scale. The appearance is smaller there is no doubt but the pastry weight and the filling weight is exactly to specification! So in this case ‘what you see’ isn’t always ‘what you get’ if you see what we mean??

The moral of this story is that Handmade products are exactly that…they are handmade and in this respect they will not be consistent in size, however to keep up the tradition of producing authentic Cornish Pasties, Proper Pasty Company prefer to stick to the age old method and deliver consistency in quality not necessarily size…it’s the content and weight that counts!!

Selling Cornish Pasties from a catering van is one of the most lucrative small business ventures we’ve ever seen!

The perfect Cornish Pasty has to come from Cornwall first and foremost! There is a long standing debate in the heart of  manufacturing Cornish Pasties, laying claim to authentication…how can a Cornish Pasty be a Cornish Pasty unless its been made in Cornwall? These debates go on and on, do Yorkshire puddings have to be manufactured in Yorkshire! Arguments ‘for’ and ‘against’ ensue, all we know is that as Cornish Pasty connoisseurs we only trust the original, the Pasty that has been hand crimped and hand filled in a Cornish factory…could there be any other?

The characteristics of the Proper Authentic Cornish Pasties are

a) Hand Made (not machined please!)
b) Cornish origin (they get our vote)
c) Smuggled via the A30 (the second best thing to come out of Cornwall)
d) Authentic Cornish Vegetable ingredients
e) A secret seasoning is essential to the Traditional Cornish Pasty
f) More ingredient than air!
g) A hand crimping to the side…not on top like a Stegasaurus!

What more can we tell you? The debate about Cornish Pasties goes on, we know where we stand on the issue do you? Visit one of our shops and let us know what you think, Proper Pasty Company bring that unmistakable taste of Cornwall to the North of England.