Cornish Cooking

How to make a traditional Cornish Pasty

The Great Oggie Hunt – Cornish Pasty

In Cornwall the traditional pasty, or ‘oggie’, is a complete meal in itself and mustn’t, they say, be eaten with anything else. Certainly not with chips and brown sauce, nor with vegetables and gravy. So, with no outside help available except, maybe, a glass of milk, the pasty itself has to be moist and succulent enough to please a Cornishman. No one knows how long the Cornish pasty has been around. But as far back as 1776, it was reported that;  “the labourers in general bring up their families with only potatoes and turnips, or leeks and pepper-grass, rolled up in a black barley crust and baked under the ashes, with now and then a little milk. Perhaps they do not taste a bit of flesh-meat in three months”.

The traditional recipe, and indeed the shape, of the Cornish pasty has been modified over the years. A recipe in the October 1890 edition of Cassell’s Family Magazine specified  “slices of meat, either pork or beef, mixed with potatoes cut in slices, also swede, turnips and shredded onions. The pasty is the ordinary dripping crust, similar to that used to make large meat pies”. More >