Cornish pasties
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008By Mr. Henry
From the New York Times:
July 8, 2008, 3:40 pm
Dept. of OopsThe Economist is, almost inarguably, a great magazine.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t make the occasional mistake. Consider this lead from a recent article about a huge Mexican mining company called Fresnillo, which was recently listed on the London Stock Exchange:
In the hills north east of Mexico City it is not uncommon to find Cornish pasties for sale.
They meant to write “pastries” but, considering that miners work really hard, they might also be hoping to encounter the kind of people who go shopping for pasties.
Yesterday the famed Freakonomics writer stepped right in the middle of his very own pie. Responses and corrections to this howler make very good reading. One true disciple wrote that Dubner could not have really meant what he said and instead was proving his own point about “the occasional mistake.”
The Cornish pasty (pass-tee) is yet another British savory pie, one designed to be held in a sweaty, arsenic-dusted, tin miner’s hand. You eat the pie and toss the hard, folded crust that serves as a handle. It’s the first hot pocket sandwich, an inventive adaptation for a worker hundreds of feet down in the ground.
To really appreciate English food, Twistie says “Have a hearty, flaky, utterly delectable Cornish pasty.”
The savory pie is the very soul of British cooking. It is a preparation suitable to an antique hearth rather than a modern stovetop, a dish prepared in the morning and left out all day, perhaps two or three days. Incorporating meat and vegetable, it constitutes a complete meal.
According to the OED, “pasty” and “pastry” are both derived from the French pasté, but pasty is the older coinage.
Pasties are first mentioned in the 13th century, before Chaucer, before Piers Plowman, before the modern language known as English. It seems British cooking has changed less in 800 years than the English language itself.
Perhaps because they couldn’t afford finely ground pastry flour, the Scots employed a sheep’s stomach to house their national dish, the haggis. There is nothing airy-fairy about those Scots. In haggis no morsel of offal is too humble to include.
Why are English eating habits so conservative when their language is so dynamic? Isn’t culture bound up in language and vice versa? If so, why is the English menu stuck in the Middle Ages? Surely tradition can bend to accommodate a few improvements, the stovetop, for example, or the refrigerator.
Indeed, it was the traditional absence of refrigeration that sustained the tradition of bitter ale. Lager needs to stay cooler than bitter ale. Though he tries every decade or so to appreciate English bitter, Mr. Henry finds it consistently revolting. Thank the glorious angels for Guinness – rich, palate-cleansing, draught Guinness.
Did the medieval French plate look like the quintessential French plate today. That is, was there a meat with a sauce (butter based), a separate vegetable, and a starch? Unlikely.
Was medieval Japanese cuisine composed of fish or fish stock? Yes, probably. Like Britain, Japan is an island kingdom. Like the Brits, the Japanese drive on the left. Like English, Japanese is a dynamic language that appropriates foreign words. (Does this seal the argument? Probably not.)
Mr. Henry is no pasty man. He takes little pleasure in the genre of savory pies. Even the South American fried empanada holds no allure. Granted, Beef Wellington, the aristocrat’s pasty, is a pleasant diversion, but almost inarguably a filet of beef is tastier when baked without crust.
