Simple Chicken Cornish Pasty Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret of the Cornish pasty? ›

Use a firm waxy potato such as Maris Peer or Wilja. A floury potato will disintegrate on cooking. Crimping is one of the secrets to a true Cornish pasty. A good hand crimp is usually a sign of a good handmade pasty.

There will always be great debate about the origin of the pasty, but one easy way to detect the Devon pasty from the Cornish is that the Devon pasty has a top-crimp and is oval in shape, whereas the Cornish pasty is semi-circular and side-crimped along the curve.

The traditional recipe for the pasty filling is beef with potato, onion and swede, which when cooked together forms a rich gravy, all sealed in its own packet! As meat was much more expensive in the 17th and 18th centuries, its presence was scarce and so pasties traditionally contained much more vegetable than today.

These Cornish Pasties are filled with a mixture of well-seasoned steak, onions, potatoes and swede (or rutabaga/yellow turnip if you're in the US). The meat and vegetables are placed in the pastry raw, with a really good pinch of salt and pepper and a few dots of butter, then sealed and cooked in the pastry.

American pasties are the American equivalent to Cornish pasties. The border between Northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is delineated by a line of pasty shops.

No debate here: carrots are "sacrilege" as the Cornish Pasty Association points out: the swede adds all the sweetness this dish needs. Older recipes tend to be vague on exact details but potatoes should be waxy, as the CPA makes clear, rather than the floury ones Mark Hix uses, so they keep their shape when cooked.

Since 2011, the Cornish Pasty has enjoyed protected status under Protected Food Names legislation; so only a pasty made to a specific recipe in Cornwall can be called a “Cornish Pasty”.

It must only contain: Roughly diced (or minced) beef, sliced or diced potato, swede (or as some call it, turnip), onion, seasoning to taste (mainly salt & pepper – we're not telling your our secret seasoning!). Yes – you read that right... No carrots!

Top tips: Serve with mashed potato and vegetables, or salad and baked beans.

Tradition has it that the original pasties contained meat and vegetables in one end and jam or fruit in the other end, in order to give the hard-working men 'two courses'. Cornish housewives also marked their husband's initials on the left-hand side of the pastry casing, in order to avoid confusion at lunchtime.

Why does a Cornish pasty have 20 crimps? ›

Given that most miners had hands like coal shovels, the "knob" of the pasty wouldn't have been anywhere large enough for them to hold it by surely? They could spread their fingers along the crimp making the pasty far easier to hold on to.

Cornish pasties are made of simple ingredients which makes them much healthier than other fast food. It is stuffed with real vegetables, not just lettuce leaves and tomatoes as in fast food burgers. The swede fillings are enriched with calcium which is good for building the bone.

In Cornwall, a pasty is often called an “Oggie”, and while it is unclear as to where the word originated, some people have suggested that it is derived from hoggan, a kind of bag in which the miners carried their croust (croust is the Cornish term for lunch).

There are five main types of pastry dough for creating pastries: flaky, shortcrust, puff, choux and filo. All of them are made primarily from flour, water and fat. However, these five types of pastry dough each have slightly different core ingredients, different ratios of ingredients and, ultimately, different uses.

According to the Cornish Pasty Association, a genuine one should contain roughly diced or minced beef, sliced or diced potato, swede, onion and seasoning to taste. The CPA is pretty strict on that and adds: 'No meat other than beef, and no vegetables apart from those listed can be used in the filling.