Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

What makes a pasty Cornish?

This week, world leaders are doing what countless Brits do every summer: unpacking their bags in a charming corner of Cornwall. The G7 summit — Joe Biden’s first, and Angela Merkel’s last — is taking place in the resort town of Carbis Bay, a stone’s throw from St Ives.

Between the speeches and the roundtables, will the world leaders find time to tuck into Cornwall’s proudest and most popular export, the Cornish pasty? Boris Johnson talked about the region’s industrial history in the run-up to the event: ‘Two hundred years ago Cornwall’s tin and copper mines were at the heart of the UK’s industrial revolution and this summer Cornwall will again be the nucleus of great global change and advancement.’ Well, you don’t invoke tin mining without putting pasties on the menu.

The origin of the pasty is difficult to trace. They are mentioned in Chaucer and Shakespeare; Jane Seymour was a fan. In a letter to Henry VIII’s third wife, a baker writes: ‘Hope this pasty reaches you in better condition than the last one.’

But then, across the world, pastry has been used as both a vessel and a means of preserving for as long as cooking has existed. In the Middle Ages, pasties were commonplace across Britain. Regional variations of hand-held pies were ubiquitous by the 1800s.

The Cornish weren’t doing anything groundbreaking with their pasties, but their particular variety became a symbol of Cornish pride, popular with the county’s many farmers and miners. The pasty was cheap, portable, nutritious and filling for those working long, physically intense days. The distinctive side-crimping allowed miners, whose hands were covered in tin or copper dust, to hold the crimped edge as a handle, and throw it away when they were done. The discarded pastry was said to please the ‘knockers’, the spirits that lived in the mines.

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Olivia Potts
Written by
Olivia Potts
Olivia Potts is a former criminal barrister who retrained as a pastry chef. She co-hosts The Spectator’s Table Talk podcast and writes Spectator Life's The Vintage Chef column. A chef and food writer, she was winner of the Fortnum and Mason's debut food book award in 2020 for her memoir A Half Baked Idea.

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