The Cornish pasty reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004
(provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Cornish pasty

A Cornish pasty is a type of food, originating in Cornwall. It is an oven-cooked pastry case containing a filling of diced meat (nowadays steak), potato, onion and turnip. It is semicircular in shape, caused by folding circular pastry sheet over the filling. The edges are fluted where the fold has been pressed to form a seal.

It is essentially a portable meal. Tradition claims that it was originally made as lunch for Cornish miners unable to return to the surface to eat. The story goes that, covered in dirt from head to foot, they could hold the pasty by the folded crust and eat the rest of the pasty without touching it, discarding the dirty pastry. The pastry they threw away was also supposed to appease the capricious spirits in the mines, the knockers, who otherwise might lead miners to into danger. In such pasties commonly meat would be at one end and a fruit filling at the other. A related tradition holds that it is bad luck for fishermen to take them to sea.

Oggy is a slang term for a Cornish pasty, see Oggy Oggy Oggy.

See Also