The miner's thick pasty crust as a handle for dirty hands is doubtful
A popular story says Cornish tin miners held their pasties by the thick crimped edge and threw it away, keeping arsenic-stained fingers off their food. Old photographs tell a different tale: pasties wrapped in paper or muslin bags and eaten from end to end, which the first Cornish recipe book, in 1929, called the true way.
Long before it belonged to miners, the pasty was a food of the rich. The word comes from medieval French for a pie baked without a dish. In 1208 King John's charter required Great Yarmouth to send a hundred herrings baked into twenty-four pasties each year, which eventually reached the king. In 1465 an archbishop's installation feast served 5,500 venison pasties, a baker wrote to Jane Seymour hoping her latest arrived in better shape than the last, and Samuel Pepys complained in his diary about a foul-smelling one.
In the 17th and 18th centuries the pasty moved down the social scale in Cornwall and west Devon. Its folded, dense pastry made a whole meal that could be carried without cutlery and stayed warm for hours underground; a cold one could be heated on a shovel over a candle. Some families marked an initial on one end so a half-eaten pasty could be reclaimed. A joke holds that the Devil avoided Cornwall for fear of ending up in a filling, and a meatless version with extra potato was called a tiddy oggy.
In July 2011, after nine years of lobbying by the Cornish Pasty Association, the European Commission granted Cornish pasty Protected Geographical Indication status. It must be D-shaped and crimped along the side, filled with chunky beef, swede, potato and onion with light peppery seasoning, and made in Cornwall, though the baking can happen elsewhere. Bakers outside the county were furious, and Cornish bakers who top-crimp, a style long used locally, can no longer call theirs Cornish.
The stakes are real: association members made about 87 million pasties in 2008, worth £60 million or roughly 6 percent of Cornwall's food economy. When tin mining declined in the 19th century, emigrating miners, nicknamed Cousin Jacks and Cousin Jennies, carried the recipe to mining regions such as Australia, Mexico and the United States.
Source: Pasty
