The Cornish Pasty: History, Folklore and What Goes In a Proper One

No food says Cornwall like the pasty. It turns up in every bakery window from Bude to Penzance, it has its own protected status in law, and it carries more history than any other item you can buy for your lunch. It is, quite literally, a piece of Cornwall you can hold in one hand. Here is the story behind it.

A miner's lunch

The pasty as we know it belongs to Cornwall's mining age. Down the tin and copper mines, a man needed a meal he could carry, keep warm, and eat in the hand without stopping work, and the pasty was the answer. Miners called their midday meal croust or crib, and the pasty was the heart of it: meat, potato and vegetable sealed in a tough pastry case that stayed warm for hours and survived being carried down a shaft in a pocket.

Some were made cleverer still, with a savoury filling at one end and something sweet like apple or jam at the other, so a miner had his main course and his pudding in a single crust.

The crimp: handle or seal?

The thick, rope-like crimp down the side of a Cornish pasty has its own legend. The story goes that miners, whose hands were grimy and sometimes carried traces of arsenic from the ore, held the pasty by its crimp and threw that last edge away rather than eat it, or left it in the mine for the knockers, the spirits of the rock. (You can read more about them in our piece on Cornish folklore.)

It is a wonderful tale, and it may well hold a grain of truth. Historians are a little cautious, though, since the crimp is first and foremost simply how you seal a pasty so the filling stays put. What is not in doubt is that the crimp goes down one side on a Cornish pasty, never across the top. That side crimp is the quickest way to tell a Cornish pasty from its Devon cousin, which is crimped along the top.

What goes in a proper one

Ask a Cornish baker and the answer is short. A genuine pasty contains just:

• Beef, usually skirt
• Potato
• Swede, which the Cornish confusingly call "turnip"
• Onion
• Plenty of salt and pepper

Everything goes in raw and cooks slowly inside the pastry, which is what gives a proper pasty its flavour. No carrot, no peas, no pre-cooked mince. An old dialect rhyme sums it up:

Pasty rolled out like a plate, Filled with turmut, tates and mate...

Turnip, potatoes and meat. Nothing else required.

Protected by law

The pasty matters enough to Cornwall that it is protected by law. In 2011 the Cornish Pasty was granted PGI status (Protected Geographical Indication), which means that to be sold as a Cornish pasty it must be made in Cornwall, be D-shaped, be crimped on one side, and contain the traditional filling. It sits in the same protected company as Champagne and the Melton Mowbray pork pie. A pasty made to the same recipe in Plymouth is, legally, just a pasty.

Oggy, oggy, oggy

The pasty even has its own war cry. The old Cornish word for a pasty was hoggan, which softened over time to oggy, and the call of "Oggy, oggy, oggy!" that rings around rugby grounds is said to have started with hungry miners and quarrymen greeting the arrival of lunch.

There is a fine old tale of a miner whose wife, once a cook for a grand Cornish family, made him a pasty with beautifully delicate pastry. By the time he had climbed down fifty fathoms it had, in his words, "scat to lembs", smashed to fragments. A proper miner's pasty, he grumbled, would survive a fall to the bottom of the shaft. Tough pastry, it turns out, was a feature, not a fault.

Where to eat one near us

The best way to understand the pasty is to eat a good one, warm, from a proper Cornish bakery. There are excellent ones all around Falmouth and Penryn, a few minutes from our cottages. For more on eating well in the area, see our guides to the best restaurants in Falmouth and Penryn and the best farm shops nearby.

Plan your visit

• Cornish superstitions and folklore: the knockers who got the last of the crimp
• Unusual and funny Cornish place names: more of Cornwall's character
• The best base to explore Cornwall: why a central spot near Falmouth reaches the whole county
• Cottages for couples near Falmouth: how a Trewena stay works as your base

Come and eat your way around Cornwall from a proper base. Our three cottages sit on the edge of Falmouth, a short drive from some very good bakeries, or drop us a message about a stay.