# Cornish Pasty in England. **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [November 3, 2018, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954 "2018-11-03T23:53:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![Yorkshire\_Pudding](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/59ef9b/32.png) [@Yorkshire\_Pudding](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yorkshire_Pudding)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2018, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/101 "2018-11-08T20:27:31Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > I didn’t know what a swede was, so thanks for that clarification. > > Is the filling pre-cooked, or do you just count on it baking inside the crust? Derived from Swedish Turnip, I believe. No, the filling’s raw, and stews inside the pastry. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2018, 10:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/102 "2018-11-08T22:34:08Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > I didn’t know what a swede was, so thanks for that clarification. > > Is the filling pre-cooked, or do you just count on it baking inside the crust? I didn’t know swede, nor “gas 4”, but I’m going to assume that’s a medium-hot oven, perhaps 350F. ---
**Author:** ![Yorkshire\_Pudding](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/59ef9b/32.png) [@Yorkshire\_Pudding](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yorkshire_Pudding)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2018, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/103 "2018-11-08T22:54:50Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > I didn’t know swede, nor “gas 4”, but I’m going to assume that’s a medium-hot oven, perhaps 350F. “Gas Marks” are reasonably standard on UK ovens. Gas ones, anyway… Electric ones use Celsius (Fahrenheit’s long, tortuous death is just about complete); Gas 4 is about 180°C, so yes, around 350°F. Swede/Rutabaga. Funny thing: first time I ever heard of rutabaga was on the ingredients list of the classic British condiment, Branston Pickle. God knows why, but it’s not listed as swede, and I had to look it up. ---
**Author:** ![Tapiotar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3be4f8/32.png) [@Tapiotar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tapiotar)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2018, 10:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/104 "2018-11-08T22:57:34Z")
Here’s a recipe for the Michigan version. From the cooking channel: > **[Michigan Pasty (Meat Hand Pie)](https://www.cookingchanneltv.com/recipes/michigan-pasty-meat-hand-pie-2042803)** > > Get Michigan Pasty (Meat Hand Pie) Recipe from Cooking Channel ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2018, 11:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/105 "2018-11-08T23:58:03Z")
> [@Yorkshire\_Pudding](#): > > Electric ones use Celsius (Fahrenheit’s long, tortuous death is just about complete); Gas 4 is about 180°C, so yes, around 350°F. That is to say, a medium oven. Although I see that on most of the internet “moderate” is more common. ---
**Author:** ![Yorkshire\_Pudding](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/59ef9b/32.png) [@Yorkshire\_Pudding](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yorkshire_Pudding)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2018, 12:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/106 "2018-11-09T00:18:09Z")
> [@Melbourne](#): > > That is to say, a medium oven. > > Although I see that on most of the internet “moderate” is more common. Do folks use adjectival settings for ovens? I’ve only ever seen them graded in some sort of numbers. ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2018, 12:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/107 "2018-11-09T00:30:40Z")
[Emeril’s recipe](https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/cornish-pasties-3644619) Alton Brown [perpetuated](http://www.goodeatsfanpage.com/season9/pocketpie/pocket_pie_tran.htm) the “Savory at one end, sweet at the other” canard. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2018, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/108 "2018-11-09T02:42:16Z")
IIUC, British ovens having “gas marks” originated as a way of smoothing out confusion from the F-C conversion. Old recipes all had temperatures in F (usually in gradations of about 50 degrees), and so ovens were marked the same way: An oven could be set to 200 F, or 250, or 300, or 350, or 400, or 450. But those wouldn’t be nice round numbers in C, but at the same time nobody wanted to throw out or re-figure their old recipes. So they kept the oven settings, but just called them “gas marks” instead of multiples of 50 F. ---
**Author:** ![Filbert](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/filbert/32/3433_2.png) [@Filbert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Filbert)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2018, 9:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/109 "2018-11-09T09:51:12Z")
> [@Melbourne](#): > > Although I see that on most of the internet “moderate” is more common. Well, a radical lefty oven would probably make you take everything to a collective bakery or something… ---
**Author:** ![Yorkshire\_Pudding](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/59ef9b/32.png) [@Yorkshire\_Pudding](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yorkshire_Pudding)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2018, 10:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/110 "2018-11-09T10:57:01Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > IIUC, British ovens having “gas marks” originated as a way of smoothing out confusion from the F-C conversion. Old recipes all had temperatures in F (usually in gradations of about 50 degrees), and so ovens were marked the same way: An oven could be set to 200 F, or 250, or 300, or 350, or 400, or 450. But those wouldn’t be nice round numbers in C, but at the same time nobody wanted to throw out or re-figure their old recipes. So they kept the oven settings, but just called them “gas marks” instead of multiples of 50 F. I used to hear “regulo” - meaning Gas Mark - from older relatives and on old radio shows from the 50s. Were things really changing from F to C that long ago? I think we were still pretty entrenched in Fahrenheit then. And a Gas Mark is equivalent to a 25°F step, as far as I can tell. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2018, 10:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/111 "2018-11-10T10:37:54Z")
> [@Yorkshire\_Pudding](#): > > Do folks use adjectival settings for ovens? I’ve only ever seen them graded in some sort of numbers. Yes, a lot of old American recipes say to cook in a high, low, or medium (moderate) oven. High is 400-450F, medium is 325-375F, and low is 250-300F, generally speaking. ---
**Author:** ![DavidwithanR](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/3bc359/32.png) [@DavidwithanR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidwithanR)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2018, 11:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/112 "2018-11-10T11:04:45Z")
> [@Filbert](#): > > That’s not a pasty, it’s a [Bedfordshire Clanger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedfordshire_clanger). Might still be a myth that it was often sweet and savoury in the past, but I like to get my mistakes accurate. > Pass-tea and pasty are virtually the same for me. In Cornwall it’s short ‘a’, not pah-stie, if you want to be authentic. Like the name “Patsy”, but with a couple of the letters in the wrong order. ---
**Author:** ![Yorkshire\_Pudding](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/59ef9b/32.png) [@Yorkshire\_Pudding](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yorkshire_Pudding)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2018, 11:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/113 "2018-11-10T11:08:04Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > Yes, a lot of old American recipes say to cook in a high, low, or medium (moderate) oven. High is 400-450F, medium is 325-375F, and low is 250-300F, generally speaking. I guess we’d say to “keep it warm in a (s)low oven” or “start it off as hot as you can, then turn down to…” but anything other than super-hot and barely on will be done numerically. Description possibly makes sense though: ovens are so variable that the settings may as well be an abstract numerical scale. ---
**Author:** ![DavidwithanR](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/3bc359/32.png) [@DavidwithanR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidwithanR)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2018, 11:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/114 "2018-11-10T11:14:22Z")
> [@Yorkshire\_Pudding](#): > > Do folks use adjectival settings for ovens? I’ve only ever seen them graded in some sort of numbers. The adjectives presumably come from a time when a home oven had a fire, and no thermometer. ---
**Author:** ![Yorkshire\_Pudding](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/59ef9b/32.png) [@Yorkshire\_Pudding](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yorkshire_Pudding)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2018, 11:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/115 "2018-11-10T11:22:37Z")
> [@DavidwithanR](#): > > The adjectives presumably come from a time when a home oven had a fire, and no thermometer. That would make sense, of course. I was just curious as to how widespread it was elsewhere, because in my experience it isn’t particularly. I know that American cookery “feels” imprecise to Brits because of the use of capacity rather than weight (which is apparently because of a self-confessedly terrible American cook who wrote a cookbook for the clueless, in which everything was done in capacity even if that wasn’t the most sensible way to measure - she was clueless - and it became popular, and the convention was established), so this may have been more of the same. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2018, 1:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/116 "2018-11-10T13:52:43Z")
Cite for the clueless cookbook? I’d be curious to read about that. Whatever the origin, it’s a self-perpetuating problem, because most Americans don’t have kitchen scales. Why not? Because we never measure ingredients by weight. Because none of our recipes use weight. Because nobody has a kitchen scale. ---
**Author:** ![DavidwithanR](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/3bc359/32.png) [@DavidwithanR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidwithanR)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2018, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/117 "2018-11-10T14:51:34Z")
> [@Yorkshire\_Pudding](#): > > … I know that American cookery “feels” imprecise … It IS imprecise, to that extent. ---
**Author:** ![Yorkshire\_Pudding](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/59ef9b/32.png) [@Yorkshire\_Pudding](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yorkshire_Pudding)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2018, 3:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/118 "2018-11-10T15:25:56Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Cite for the clueless cookbook? I’d be curious to read about that. > > Whatever the origin, it’s a self-perpetuating problem, because most Americans don’t have kitchen scales. Why not? Because we never measure ingredients by weight. Because none of our recipes use weight. Because nobody has a kitchen scale. It was The Boston Cooking School Cook Book, by Fannie Merritt Farmer (the “Mother of Level Measurements”). So maybe not “clueless”, but the story - as I found it in Bee Wilson’s “Consider the Fork” - goes that she had no flair, no feel (and no truck with the idea that such things mattered) and she knew what suddenly being cast adrift in a kitchen with no experience felt like. So she was utterly rigorous about the idea that a series of volumes and measurements, followed to the letter, would turn out right. And her idea sold ridiculously well. Historically, American cooks had used the same jumble of weights and measures as everyone else, and she sought to simplify this for the bewildered…but didn’t really get it. But of course, the bewildered who were her audience didn’t get it either, so didn’t criticise! ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2018, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/119 "2018-11-11T01:08:51Z")
> [@Yorkshire\_Pudding](#): > > That would make sense, of course. I was just curious as to how widespread it was elsewhere, because in my experience it isn’t particularly. > > I know that American cookery “feels” imprecise to Brits because of the use of capacity rather than weight (which is apparently because of a self-confessedly terrible American cook who wrote a cookbook for the clueless, in which everything was done in capacity even if that wasn’t the most sensible way to measure - she was clueless - and it became popular, and the convention was established), so this may have been more of the same. All of our American Cookbooks used F. “Moderate” or “Medium” would be in the CWA cookbook (Country Womans Association), and yes, they would have been using ovens without accurate temperature readings, and, further, the same temperature means different things in different types of oven. Also in school/community recipe collections. Magazine recipes would have given both the descriptive term and F. _Only_ our American cookbooks gave weights. _None_ of our Aus cookbooks used weight. Only volume, except perhaps for meat. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2018, 1:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954/120 "2018-11-11T01:22:48Z")
A few years ago, I read an [article](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/dining/tipping-the-balance-for-kitchen-scales.html) in The New York Times advocating the use of weight measures instead of volume measures when cooking. The article suggested that you could be more precise and mess up fewer containers. It sounded good, but then I still saw volumes used in recipes after that. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954.md?page=5) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cornish-pasty-in-england/823954.md?page=7)