Imagine you're underground. You're mining coal the old fashioned way - pick in hand, banging away at the cold rock wall, choking on coal dust and sweating under your brow, and the only sound louder than the ominous echo of metal on stone is your stomach grumbling.
Finally, your break for lunch - probably after like, 8 hours of hard labour or something - so you sit down on the cavern floor, unwrap your sandwich....only to get dirt and coal dust all over the bloody thing, rendering it inedible. Shit.
Such was the life of early Cornish miners, a vicious cycle of mmm lunchtime and oh bugger it's all dirty. Thus the Cornish pasty was born!
The idea of the somewhat triaangular shape, of course, is to hold it by either end and manch away - when you're done you simple throw the two soiled corners into a dark hole in the ground, where it no doubt becomes sustenance for an earthworm or goblin or something.
I absolutely adore the story behind these things - it's so rugged and working class - and yet I've never made them or even, to memory, eaten them outside the realm of the school canteen, where, I'm ashamed to say, they had the reputation as a poor mans sausage roll.
This is how came I to be apprehensive in the buildup to cooking this evening - I loved the story and yet wasn't actually all that excited about eating them. Before I let you all know how they turned out - because I'm sure the suspense is killing you - I'll address some things that may be bothering the more astute readers.
First of all, I'm not sure that what I made were actually Cornish pasties. I don't mean that in the sense that I nursed a chicken egg only to have a gnarly lizard crawl out of it six months later, I mean the recipe I used was actually for vegetable pasties - and I didn't do any shopping around because this particular recipe was just that rarest of birds - a decent gluten free pastry dish. I myself love a bit of gluten, however the woman of my life gets violently ill when she eats it, and as British cuisine is all about sharing the love, it was gluten free or bust.
Which brings me to the second point, that of my pasties decidedly sickly appearance. First of all, this is what gluten free pastry looks like (sigh), and then to to top it off I don't have a cooking brush, so when it came to basting the half cooked pasties with egg I was somewhat pathetically reduced to smearing it over with my fingers for seconds at a time, quickly retracting my digits lest they become singed. Hence the, shall we say, misshapen pattern of glaze across the tops.
Have you had a quick peek at it? Good.
I'll say one thing, xantham gum is THE. SHIT. Seriously, I hate gluten free baking with such an intense passion it's like poison bile that builds in my tubes - you can make a dough which looks workable enough...
...but the instant you try to do anything with it, it crumbles to bits. Xantham gum is the missing glue that gluten usually acts as, and with a mere teaspoon of it today I managed to get through the rolling, folding, and baking without a single hitch. GET IN ON IT.
The filling of Cornish pasties is one of the best things about them - it's essentially leftovers wrapped in pastry. I had to fake it a bit today by using purpose roasted veggies, but conceivably anything could be made to serve as innards for these things - roast dinners, curries, you name it. I envision that with a bit more practice making the pastry - and it really is simple enough that you could get it happening pretty quickly - it'd be the ultimate lunchbox staple, killing two birds with one stone in a truly heritage way.
So after all that, how did they actually taste? In a word, heug.
It's Cornish for delicious.
Til next Sunday folks
- Jon
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