Did you know that there is a strong belief in Scandinavia that the secret ingredient of an authentic Cornish Pasty is the accumulated pieces of ear lobe pips that are left over from when people have their ears pierced?? I’ve always wondered what happened to those little ear lobe pips…mystery solved?
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!
What is it a about Cornish Pasties that we love? Is it the secret seasoning that those nasty Cornish people mix with the locally farmed vegetables that makes us crave them fortnightly? Is it the myriad of flavours that are offered that tempt us back to discover the next mouth watering serving? Or can it be that they put something else in the cornish pasty that makes us crave the golden cased meal?
In our opinion there are many different reasons as to why we love the pasty, but it is reliant upon one thing and one thing only…your first experience of a true cornish pasty, not the type that Greggs or Bakers Oven put in the window, these are not original cornish pasties!! No these are a hybrid of the authentic oggy, they are filled with ground beef, a very thin layer of vegetables and air… a true Cornish Pasty is cram packed full of goodness…take one apart and you will see that the pastry case traps a bounty of fresh localy farmed vegetable, the finest meat content, whether it is Lamb, Chicken or Steak…there is little room for air!
The Cornish Pasty also reminds us of those summer holidays in the South West, sitting on the beach with mates watching the surfers in Newquay whilst biting into a Lamb & Mint Cornish Pasty and washing it down with an refreshing bottle of Cornish Ale! Happy Days
The pasty is a traditional symbol of Cornwall. Pasty myths and legends abound, nobody can quite pinpoint when Cornish Pasties originated, but there is evidence of them being made during the reign of Henry VIII.
Over the centuries they became the staple diet of Cornish miners, engineers and blacksmiths, everyone but fishermen, as it was considered bad luck to take a pasty on board a fishing boat. According to superstition, it is the pasty that keeps the devil out of Cornwall.
The wives of the Tin Miners would make a Pasty for their husbands to take to the mine, usually containing leftovers of meals from the week, they would add pepper to disguise the taste of the mixture of different meals. In one end the savoury and in the other the sweet, a two course meal in a pastry case! The crimp would be finished in a knot towards the end of the pasty, this knot would be the only piece of the meal that the Miner would not eat as it was rumoured to keep the Devil away!
It is also rumoured that the pastry case was a protection to the Miner, the case served as a protective pocket for the meat (and sometimes fruit) filling, as the Miners would take arsenic onto their hands when Mining the tin. The arsenic contaminated Pastry case was then discarded…what sacrilege!
Sometimes the Pastry case would bear the initials of the Miner so that the savoury lunch could be eaten and then later the Miner would return to eat the remaining fruit filled case. The initials would either be scored into the case of the Pasty or laid on top with pastry pieces.
The pastry case acts as a small pressure cooker during the ‘bake-off’ this assists in the cooking process containing the heat long after the Pasty is removed from the oven.
To make an authentic pasty, the vegetables, comprising of onions, potatoes and suede (they call it turnip in Cornwall) must be diced. The meat, usually skirt of chuck steak, should be chopped. Baking takes about an hour, during which time the filling steams and it’s flavours blend together. Freshly baked pasties stay warm for up to an hour.
You never talk of a ‘Cornish Pasty’ in Cornwall. It is always “Pasty”, pure and simple.
Today, visitors believe that a trip to Cornwall would not be complete without tasting a Cornish Pasty, Proper Pasty Company are proud to bring a piece of Cornwall to the North of England.
