Food and Back Migration: The Cornish Pasty Plot Thickens

When people move to a new country what changes do they make in their cuisine? And if they move back to their homeland, do they introduce the changed cuisine?

Since so much culinary change comes from transfers of ideas, techniques and ingredients from one area to another, these questions are central to food history.

Buckle your seatbelts because this is getting into some pretty detailed stuff.

My theory: the Cornish pasty created by the emigrant network

For many years now, I have been puzzled by the Cornish pasty, a half-moon crimped wheat flour pastry filled with chopped beef, potatoes, onions and turnips.  In 2011 the European Union granted the Cornish Pasty Protection of Geographical Indication, so that only pasties made in Cornwall, the south westernmost county of England that juts out into the Atlantic, could be described as Cornish.

A Cornish pasty

The Cornish in Cornwall and the vastly greater number of Cornish overseas today describe it as miners’ food, handy to eat at the bottom of a deep shaft. The standard story is when miners emigrated from Cornwall as the tin-mining industry fell on hard times in the nineteenth century they took the pasty with them to their new homes in more prosperous mining areas in Latin America, notably Mexico, the United States, Australia, and South Africa.

I have argued in the journal Petits Propos Culinaires and here on my blog that the Cornish pasty as now defined cannot have been miners’ food in nineteenth century Cornwall. Fine white wheat flour and fresh beef were beyond the means of miners driven by poverty to emigrate.

So I have suggested the Cornish pasty as we know it today was a creation of migrants who earned so much more overseas that they could afford these luxury ingredients.  And that furthermore, given the tight network of miners around the world, the pasty traveled around this network, including moving back to Cornwall itself.

Peter Brears’ theory:  The Cornish pasty created by the urban middle class around London

Now Peter Brears, a food historian whom I admire enormously, has taken up the origins of the Cornish pasty in the latest issue of Petits Propos Culinaires, which just dropped into my mailbox yesterday.

I’m delighted to say that there is much that we agree about.  He too believes that the Cornish pasty as now known is nothing like what nineteenth-century Cornish miners ate in Cornwall. He agrees that wherever the Cornish pasty became as standard, it wasn’t Cornwall.

So Peter Brears offers a quite different and very intriguing story about the “Cornish” pasty’s origin.  He argues that, although it drew its inspiration from the pasties of Cornwall, the new “Cornish pasty”  differed in being limited to the meat and potato version and, most importantly, in being just a couple of inches long, an economical nibble for a middle class diner.

Peter Brears traces the pasty to the proliferation of cookery schools that followed the foundation of the South Kensington School of Cookery (later the National School of Cookery) in London in 1873. In cookery schools and “board” (that is, partially state-funded elementary schools founded following an Act of Parliament in 1870), thousands of (largely) urban English housewives, teachers, and children were taught the basics of cooking.

One of the standard recipes in cookbooks and syllabi was–yes–the Cornish pasty, smaller than we know it today but with the same ingredients.

By the end of the nineteenth century, these pasties were sold in bakeries across England, including Cornwall.  Brears concludes the “Cornish” pasty was “the quintessentially English pasty.”

Interestingly there is some additional evidence for Brears’ thesis from an individual signing himself ARGENTUM in the Australian newspaper, the Barrier Miner, 25 February 1897.  He bemoans the new-fangled dainty pasties gaining ground in Cornwall, attributing them to the pernicious influence of the cooking schools.

I have for some time past entertained grave doubts upon the subject of Cornish pasties. It is true there are pasties and pasties. A snatch of conversation between two wife-proud Cornish miners recurs to me; and as the real test of a Cornish wife is, or was (alas for these degenerate days!) the making of pasties, their prowess in that regard was discussed. Finally the victor exclaimed, “Why, my old ‘ooman she can maek paesty. Why, you can thraw ‘undown a 40 fathom shaft and ‘ud’n break un.”

But (alas once more for these degenerate days!) there is a crusade in Cornwall itself against the pasty that could be thrown down a 40 fathom shaft unbroken. The school-master and ma’am are abroad; and Launceston and Bodmin and Camborne and other centres have their new-fangled cooking and dressmaking schools. And between them they are discouraging the pasty that ‘ud’n break, and are encouraging the crisp thing that crumbles in the fingers, spilling the gravy in a most outrageous fashion.

An interviewer lately sought out the principal of one of these cooking schools, under the Technical Education Department; and she quoted doctors to support her opinion that ” the children especially suffer in health from the everlasting pasty and heavy cake.”

A leading doctor said : “Do you observe that, apart from any definite disease, our miners are not a very robust class of men?” And then, after a pause, he sententiously added,”Cold pasties with thick crust, and indestructible hoggans.” The summing up of the whole controversy is that while a good pasty maketh glad the heart of man, a bad one, which is commoner, is an engine of destruction.

And indeed, in 1888, Miss Margaret Pearson, graduate of the National School of Cookery in London, arrived in Melbourne to give cookery lessons to young women at the Working Men’s College.  Within a few months she published Cookery Recipes for the People, a book that presumably included the Cornish pasty, and that was to sell more than 13,000 copies. So here is probable proof of the direct transmission of the “Cornish” pasty from England to Australia.

Problem solved. My goodness. It looks like I was completely wrong.  I wouldn’t really mind that.  For me history, among other things, means putting forward interesting ideas and seeing if they fly.

Or was I on to something that fills out this story? that’s why I say the plot thickens.

When and why did Cornish miners around the world adopt the Cornish pasty?

Peter Brears does not address the question of the overseas Cornish.  The problem is that most of the mining migration occurred before the creation of the “Cornish” pasty: Latin America in the early years of the nineteenth century, the US and Canada in the 1840s, South Australia in the 1860s, and the last destination, South Africa in the 1880s and 90s.

Yet essentially all these emigrants celebrate their “Cornish” pasty. Just a few remarks.

Mexico. I don’t think any English cookery teachers went to Hidalgo, Mexico.  Although the Cornish pasty is first cousin to the empanada, they are distinct and are much appreciated.

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  The Lockwoods are the experts on the pasties here.  They take them to have been introduced in the 1840s and picked up by Finnish immigrants (who had a somewhat similar dish) in the 1860s.  Does this story have to be revised?  And I’m not sure about English cookery teachers. They did influence the home economics movement but the Cornish pasty only occurs in areas of Cornish immigrants.

Australia.  Here I draw on conversations with Adam Balic for ideas about competitive cooking and the standardization of dishes and for putting me on to Trove, the wonderful and free Australian newspaper archive.  

In the second half of the nineteenth century,  the Cornish in Australia are eating pasties.  Many are mainly vegetable, filled with leek, turnip, and potato.  The meat is most often a bit of bacon (salt pork).

In the 1890s in Australia, the Cornish pasty social and/or supper, usually a Methodist event, became a fixture in southern Australia, dutifully recorded in local newspapers.  Pasties were served with tea or coffee at the end of the meetings at which Cornish stories, anecdotes, and songs were rehearsed.

At the same time,  and I’d say that nine out of ten of the couple of hundred references to Cornish pasties in Australian newspapers are for this, local shows had a Cornish pasty category. Show pasties, which Adam Balic speculates in a letter to me, may have done much to standardize the pasty recipe, provoked a good bit of scorn among Cornish traditionalists. Their crust was too tender, their gravy was too abundant, and they would never have done down the mine.  This suggests not just standardization but refinement: a crust made not with suet or even lard, but butter; a greater quantity of meat.

Two points are clear.  First, the newspapers show that the Australian Cornish tracked what was going on in Cornwall quite carefully.  Second, socials and shows were very important in the development of the Australian “Cornish pasty.”  How they should be weighted against cookbooks and cookery teachers is not clear.

So where do we stand?

I love Peter Brears’ introduction of the cookery schools, teachers, and their recipe books.  I am not sure they are the whole story though because it’s not clear (a) how much elementary school children absorbed from these lessons, (b) how the recipes entered the commercial realm, (c) why they chose to dub these pasties Cornish (perhaps unknowable), and (d) how they spread around the emigrant network.

The obvious next step is to look at the English (not free) and American newspaper archives to see what they turn up. Were emigrants delighted to find that there was something called the Cornish pasty?  Were emigrants quicker to accept the daintified pasty given their probable higher incomes?  Were socials and shows (competitive cooking) also important in what it’s tempting to call the gentrification of the pasty in England?

__________________

Thanks to Erica Peters for digging around in Google Books more effectively than I did.

For Margaret Pearson, I am grateful to Charmain Liza O’Brien’s “‘Plain’ Food in Colonial Australia . . . Or, Was It?” on Google Scholar.

For the pasty in the Upper Michigan Peninsula, see Yvonne and William Lockwood, “Pasties in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula,” in Barbara Shortridge et al, eds. The Taste of American Place: A Reader on Regional and Ethnic Foods (Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).

• ← Cuisine and Empire in Paperback
• Why the Beef? Empire and Cuisine →