Pasty, the Subterranean Sandwich

Once Patrick Burrows gets talking about Cornish pasties, he can entertain you for hours. That’s just what he did at the Totally Pasty Dinner he recently gave as a fund-raiser for his church, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Santa Monica.

Whenever pasties are the topic, he’ll recite at least one corny old saying about them. For example: “You can beat an egg, you can beat a carpet, but you can’t beat a good Cornish pasty.”

OK, so it sounds silly. But most people who try these football-shaped meat-and-vegetable turnovers would agree with Burrows.

Pasties are steeped in more lore than most people can imagine, and Burrows has tracked down a great deal of it, from the pasty’s origins as a steamed pudding and its journey to the Americas with Cornish miners to its recent appearance at a Hawaiian fast-food stand.

Guests attending the pasty dinner got a tour of Burrows’ library, with its sizable collection of books devoted to the little southwestern corner of England called Cornwall. Sample titles: “Cornish Legends” by Robert Hunt and “Old Cornwall Recipes” by Catherine Rothwell. Burrows showed off his well-thumbed copy of the Old Farmer’s Almanac, with its section explaining how the wives of Cornish miners invented the pasty. The almanac advises that pasty is pronounced PASS-tee--”not to be confused with the traditional garb of scantily dressed dancers.”

Burrows, a tall, athletic Southern California native who grew up playing football in the sunny public parks of Alhambra and won gold and silver medals in high school track, defies the stereotype of a food hobbyist who likes to spend hours in the library researching the Cornish pasty.

“It’s part of my heritage,” he explains.

When his family drove across the country on vacations, Burrows’ mother would pack pasties for their first meal on the road. It was a meal everyone looked forward to.

But Burrows’ infatuation with pasties goes well beyond his family’s traditions. When they could have gone to Hawaii or Bali for their honeymoon, he and his bride, Nancy Wimberly-Shinno, spent it traveling around Cornwall to do pasty research.

They wandered the quaint cobbled streets of ancient Cornish seacoast towns such as Falmouth and St. Ives. Each town, no matter how small, had at least six or seven pasty shops with pasties stacked up like cordwood in the windows.

“Pasties were their entire business,” Burrows says, marveling.

Visiting as many pasty shops as they could and talking to Cornwall bakers, the couple amassed even more lore and information. They found that most bakers use paper baking pan liners because they make pasties brown better and prevent the juices that inevitably leak during baking from sticking, as they usually do even on nonstick pans.

They discovered that the idea of identifying a pasty’s filling (beef, cheese or whatever) by carving a letter in the dough comes from the custom of marking the owner’s initials on the pasty a Cornish miner traditionally took to work with him; this would distinguish it from other pasties scattered about on the mine timbers. Some pasties had a sweet corner, a bit of jam or jelly filling in one end to enjoy as dessert.

Before leaving Cornwall, the Burrowses acquired a treasure-trove of pasty memorabilia: tea towels with pictures of pasties and some with Cornish sayings, banners with Cornish recipes and a video about Cornish miners. They found wonderful books of the sort Burrows prefers, ones that reveal something of food in the context of life.

“I like cookbooks that give a picture of how people used certain foods or dishes--a taste of history, so to speak.”

Burrows says he wants his nieces and nephews to know what their ancestors contributed to American life.

Burrows’ grandfather and his grand-uncles, who went to Central City, Colo., in the heyday of the gold and silver mines there, were part of the exodus of Cornish miners in the middle of the 19th century. Spurred by the decline of Cornwall’s mining industry, the miners traveled the world to find work. The Cornish saying, “Wherever you find a deep hole, you’ll find a Cornishman,” explains why pasties have become regional specialties in so many mining areas in the Americas.

The Central City mines played out about 1885, so when Phelps-Dodge Co. gained control of the Copper Queen Mine in Bisbee, Ariz., the Burrows family moved there to mine it.

“That’s how I learned about the existence of different Cornish mining towns around the country,” Burrows says. “My relatives lived in some of them.”

Today, vestiges of Cornish influence turn up in eating places like Kuz ‘n Jax, a fast-food pasty shop in Marquette, Mich. The Cornishmen were nicknamed “Cousin Jacks” because they nearly always had a Cousin Jack (or Cousin Jenny) back home who wanted a job. The Cousin Jacks were not only experienced miners, they were also excellent masons who could build engine houses, pump houses and smelters. Many could construct the heavy beam pumps needed to extract ground water from deep mines.

Hard-rock mining, with its dangerous dynamite blasts and long working hours in cramped spaces lighted with only a candle affixed to the miner’s hat, took a certain strength and tenacity. It’s said that besides these traits, Cornish miners had an uncanny knack for finding the veins with the richest ore, even more accurately than mining engineers and geologists.

To keep their pasties in edible condition, the miners carried specially designed pasty lunch boxes, often with a secret compartment for liquor or a place for a live coal to keep the pasty warm. These antique boxes are collector’s items. “You can’t even get them in England,” Burrows says.

Based on his cookbooks and the books about Cornish miners, Burrows has been able to make a sort of historical chronology of the pasty. In Vida Heard’s “Cornish Cookery: Recipes of Today and Yesteryear,” he found a description of the ancient “bag pudding” made from barley meal, raisins and pork blood that was the predecessor of today’s pasty.

Burrows likes to think that the pudding was served by King Arthur at Camelot because he read about it in John Steinbeck’s translation of Mallory’s “King Arthur and His Noble Knights.” Of course, Mallory was not an authority on food history.

Much later, in the early 19th century, the common miner’s pasty--also called a hogan or auggie in some parts of Cornwall--was a chunk of unleavened barley dough into which vegetables and an occasional bit of pork were inserted. The Cornish miners couldn’t afford wheat flour, but no matter: The barley dough pasties were famously tough. It was said they could withstand a fall down a mine shaft, and pasties have borne that reputation ever since.

The old-time pasty or auggie was “a triumph of Cornish make-do,” Heard writes. The overstuffed American sandwich called a hoagie probably gets its name from the auggie.

Around the 1840s, the auggie evolved into the more refined stuffed wheat-crusted pasty and became part of everyday Cornish eating. Children who took pasties to school made sure to be friendly with the pasty monitor, who decided where each pasty would be placed by the fire that would warm them for lunch. They might find rabbit meat in their pasties, because rabbit was easier to acquire than beef.

Burrows has been perfecting his pasty pastry recipe for years, constantly analyzing recipes from cookbooks and trying something new. When The Times Food Section ran an issue devoted to the attributes of lard and Burrows learned it was lower in cholesterol than butter, he was elated. Lard makes the best pasty crust, he believes. He now renders his own lard from fresh pork fat.

“Lard rendering is so easy,” he says enthusiastically. “You simply bake the fat in a 200-degree oven on a rimmed cookie sheet then pour off the liquid.” He also likes the flavor that real beef suet gives to his meat-filled pasties.

HiHs latest triumph, airy pasties, are baked without a filling. “What I like best about these,” Burrows says, “is you can bake them, freeze them, then fill them with whatever you want right before you eat.” Burrows gives a California-style vegetarian filling recipe for airy pasties.

Granny’s Pasties, a shop in Cornwall, typifies this trend of using novel pasty fillings. Granny’s offers chicken curry and “figgy” (raisin-nut) fillings along with the more traditional beef or chicken. In Cornwall and in London, Burrows says, supermarkets now sell pasties with a wide variety of fillings.

Perhaps that’s how another of Burrows’ favorite Cornish sayings arose: “The devil never ventures into Cornwall for fear a baker would put him into a pasty.”

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Personalized Pasties

It can be hard to tell one pasty from another. That’s why Cornish miners put their initials on the pasties they took to work with them. Patrick Burrows marks his pasties as well. The practice is not only historically accurate, it’s also useful. Sometimes Burrows marks the initials of the recipient of the pasty; other times, he indicates the type of filling the pasty contains. Burrows uses a pointed soldering iron to personalize his pasties, but initials can also be carved with the tines of a fork.