Читать книгу The Taste of Britain - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall - Страница 74

A bit of pastry is everything to a Cornish household. I can remember the sense of shock when I visited my up-country in-laws for the first time and neither they nor their five daughters had a rolling pin’ (Merrick, 1990).

Pasty is an old English word for a pie of venison or other meat baked without a dish (OED). Samuel Pepys consumed great numbers of them, as his diary relates. However, the use of the word declined in a large part of England and the only region where it survives is that stronghold of pastry, the South West, especially Cornwall. Here, the form settled into a fixed type: a pie that was food for the working man and his family. Spicer (1948), collecting regional recipes in the 1940s, remarked that pasties were originally baked on an iron plate set on the hearth, covered with an iron bowl, with ashes and embers heaped around. The Cornish were part of the English highland tradition which used a bakestone and pot-oven rather than the masonry or brick oven of champion country. Under the dialect name fuggan, references to pasties can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century (Wright, 1896-1905), defined as ‘an old Cornish dish… which is a pasty of very thick crust filled with potatoes’.

Tradition states that such food was the portable midday meal of miners and farm labourers, and that the Cornish will put anything in a pasty - meat, fish, bacon, cheese, vegetables, eggs or, in times of dearth, wild herbs. Potatoes, onions, leeks and turnips are allowed, but carrots are not customary; nor is minced, as opposed to chopped, meat. Fishermen, ideal beneficiaries of the convenience of the pasty, in fact eschew it. It is thought bad luck to bring one on a boat (Merrick, 1990). Pasties were often made too large to consume at a single sitting, and their ingredients were varied according to individual preference. Cooks would therefore mark each pasty with the initials of each intended recipient so that they could take up the relic they left off, and avoid a nasty surprise at the first bite.

The pasty’s success has been contagious since World War II. There are manufacturers everywhere. This may lead to variations, for example Priddy Oggie, sometimes quoted as a long-standing regional dish, is a pork-filled pasty with a cheese pastry which was invented in the late 1960s in Somerset.