Pasty ‘expertise’ should be taken with pinch of salt

✒ GINSTERS’ ‘expert’ quoted in your April 11 edition (“Ginsters claims most people eating pasties the wrong way round”) is misinformed. It is not ‘traditional’ to eat the pasty horizontally holding the crimp, and miners would not throw away the crimped piece.

Crimping on the side or the top is entirely individual or familial preference, and has only become a bone of contention as lack of connection to local history has required confected ‘traditions’ over much wider county areas to make a fuss about, and possibly sell bumper stickers.

Photographs of miners, particularly JC Burrow’s underground pictures made in the 19th century, show miners at croust time eating their pasties upright from one tip to the other, out of paper or muslin bags: strangely, exactly how they are mostly eaten today.

We don’t want to get greasy hands; the miners surely wanted to avoid grit and dust on their meal as much as possible, so held the pasty in the bag and ate downwards, also ensuring any gravy was contained. It is plausible that a nominal piece was discarded for superstitious reasons, but the idea that a significant part of the only meal on the shift would be thrown away by ravenous men is absurd, either for superstition or because they were fastidious. In some mines the heat and exhaustion were so great six-hour shifts were the most that could be withstood; even then men died from ‘falling away’ after sudden fits of dizziness, while climbing 1,000ft up ladders at the end of a ‘core,’ so nourishment was fundamental.

The idea that ingredients were sacrosanct is also nonsense, and would have depended on availability. In Cornish Recipes Ancient and Modern (1929) Edith Martin writes: “It is said that the Devil never crossed the Tamar into Cornwall on account of the well-known habit of Cornish women of putting everything into a pasty, and that he was not sufficiently courageous to risk such a fate!”

She also mentions the habit of putting initials at one corner, contended to be either for marking in case of not finishing in one sitting, or perhaps where the idea of discarding a small piece for the Knockers came from.

Likewise in S Daniell’s Old Cornwall: “No doubt some [pilchards] found their way into the Cornish pasty of barley flour [unlike today’s ‘authentic’ wheaten pastry] which, although customarily made of ‘turmut, tates and mate,’ could be provided with almost any kind of sweet or savoury filling to suit individual tastes.”

The pasty didn’t necessarily form the entirety of the croust, as “the coarse, dark barley flour found its way into the miner’s ‘mussel bag’ in other forms.

Great favourites were heavy cake, fuggan and hobbin, in each of which flour and currants played a dominant role, with results as solid, filling and indigestible as their names suggest.”

The indigestibility is evidenced in Herbert Thomas’s Cornish Mining Interviews where Dr Permewan, medical officer of the Redruth Rural District, reports: “Cooking in the home is not of a very high order. Heavy hoggans, which would fall ten fathoms without breaking, and cold pasties with thick crust are not the most digestible kinds of food, and apart from any definite disease, our miners are not a very robust class of men.

They are pale, and many of them small and sickly, though with higher wages and cheaper food they are probably better fed than formerly. When miners are put about other work they do not, as a rule, display great strength, and it has been often said that the spalling girl will break more rock than a miner who may be given work on the floors.”

I’m sure Ginsters’ success means its can support a reference library to ensure their misleading statements are rather better substantiated. Joshua Taylor

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