I recently heard through the grapevine—Oh, alright! It was through Tammy who heard it from Nigel—that the Cornish pasties sold at Twin Beaches Bakery aren’t authentic. It seems that the seam is in the wrong place. I wasn’t going to let that one go without a good fight!

My first issue was that (again!) I learned I had been pronouncing the name wrong. I thought that pasty rhymed with “pastry,” logic based upon my false assumption that the circular covers, often tasselled, worn by strippers (in more modest times) to cover their nipples were called pasties because they looked like the pastry pasties. I had it all backwards.

The tasselled pasties—no one really knows what the singular of the word is because they always come in pairs—sound like “paste” because they are pasted on.

Pasties, the meat turnovers with the contentious seam, have an “a” sound like “pasta,” the Latin word for dough, which they are made from. There is absolutely no connection to nipple pasties at all.

With some variance due to different British dialects, the pastry pasty is pronounced: PAHS-tee.

The pastry turnover as a to-go food is universal: calzones; empanadas; pasties; perogies; Jamaican patties; egg rolls; pizza pops. There are few counties that do not have some version of this finger food. Pasties (the pastry kind, which from here on in will be the only pasty I refer to) are not an invention of the Cornish, or of any one particular culture. They are simply a food wrapped in a pastry shell and baked, usually intended as an individual serving. Throughout history, there have been pasties filled with everything from cheeses, meats, fish and seafood, vegetables, and sweets.

The pasty was a perfect food for miners and farmers to take to work. It came in its own wrapper, required no cutlery, and stayed warm even hours from the oven. The original crust—and I use those words with hesitation—was not like the short pastry we prefer today. This pastry had to be tough enough to withstand being jammed inside a pocket or under the jacket of a working man. It would stay hot for hours, giving an additional benefit: it kept the worker warm.

A typical filling would be diced beef, potatoes, turnip, and onions. You can find any number of “authentic” recipes with carrots or other vegetables. Some say that using mutton and carrots is definitely a “Devon” thing. There are many speculations that some women even went so far as putting a sweet in one end, like fruit or jam, so that their men could have a dessert with their tea. That somehow seems a bit too frivolous when we think of the hard times these 18^th and 19^th century Cornish miners lived in. Just the logistics of baking raw meat in one end with apples and raisins in the other end seems impossible.

I imagine that what went in those lunches will never be exactly known; the contents would have varied from season to season; with good times and bad. When times were harder, there would be less meat and more root vegetables.

What constitutes a truly authentic Cornish pasty is debatable even among the people of Cornwall. But the real debate centers not so much as what should be in a Cornish pasty, but rather where the seam is located.

A pasty can be made in one of two ways. Either the filling is placed over one half of a circle of dough and the other half folded over and pinched off in a seam, or the filling is placed down the middle of the circle of dough and both sides are pulled up over and a seam is pinched across the top (as do the Cornish pasties sold at the bakery).

It seems perfectly logical to accept the explanation of most Cornish pasty experts, that since these turnovers were being made for men working in mines who had no place to wash up and were often working with poisonous materials, the best place to put the seam would be along the side. The miner could hold the pasty by the seam and throw that portion away when he got too close. Pasties made with a seam across the top tend to be fatter and seem to beg for a plate and fork.

When Cornish miners began to emigrate to mining areas in the U.S., Australia, and South Africa, they took their lunch snack with them, where it became known as the Cornish pasty. The contents of the pasty would evolve over time with availability of ingredients in the new countries as well as with fusion with similar pastries being brought by immigrants from other countries. 

The term “traditional” can have many meanings. Even in Cornwall, there are other versions of pasty: mutton instead of beef; herb with spinach, watercress, and bacon; “Licky” or leek; fish and seafood. Within each Cornish family, there may also be a tradition of a pasty recipe passed down for generations that varies from their neighbours.

There is a movement in Cornwall to have the Cornish pasty given a controlled designation like other countries do with their cheeses or wines. They will have to come to some agreement first. I stumbled across a transcript from the British House of Commons that addressed the “carrots: in or out” issue of pasties made in Cornwall. One particular authority on British foods, Alan Davidson, author of The Oxford Companion to Food, says that the Cornish pasty has “a seam of crimped pastry running the full length of the upper side.”

And so we will continue to call the pasty at the bakery a Cornish pasty, because this is what most of the non-Cornish world accepts as a generic term for this type of meat turnover, and we aren’t working in the mines. Certainly, in the unlikely event the British House of Commons should come to an agreement as to what constitutes a true Cornish pasty, we will respect their decision and change the name to Gabriola pasty.