Category: Main coursePrice: £1.58 Ingredients: wheat flour, potato, british beef, vegetable margarine, savoury stock (water, maltodextrin, glucose syrup, salt, yeast extract, onion powder, sunflower oil, sugar, malt extract, flavouring, black pepper), beef fat, swede, onion, egg, modified maize starch, salt, black pepper, mustard seed Cornish pasties are one of those working-class convenience foods. Legend has it that miners' wives would bake pasties for them with meat and potatoes in one side, and fruit in the other side so that they'd have a full meal in a crust. And the folded edge of the pasty was made extra-thick so that they could hold onto that edge and eat the center without getting their dirty miner hands on their food. Modern ones just have the meat filling and no fruit. I've had pasties in the US, but there they are not called "cornish" and they have a much different crust. In the US it is more like a plain pie crust. Here, it is a flaky puff pastry crust. Before we ate my husband gave the warning that it would probably be mostly crust and hardly any filling. The outside is nicely golden brown and it smells mostly of pastry and meat. I expected the filling to be a lot like the pasty fillings I've had in the US, which tend to be dry combinations of cubed meat, potatoes, and carrots - very heavy on the potatoes. This was much more moist than I expected. The filling was a finely minced beef, blended with potatoes and big chunks of rutabaga. The ingredients list more potato than meat, but I honestly didn't notice. The potatoes are blended in to provide moisture to the meat, which is heavily spiced with pepper. Basically, I was expecting a bland pile of potatoes in the middle of a tough crust. This was a flavorful and moist filling in a lovely crisp puff pastry filling. I'd definately eat these again. (Hey, that's one of the first meat-based dishes I've really liked.)
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Alana Muir © 2006