Small correction - they were tin or copper miners. There are no coal mines in Cornwall.
Thanks. I thought my memory might be faulty, and I couldn’t be sure. I do remember learning about the ‘bones’ of all those pasties in the mines, though.
Cornish tin mines had tons of arsenic floating around. That was what they didn’t want to get on their hands or food. The same Cornish miners brought their pasties to the UP in Michigan when the copper and iron mines were booming. Nowadays you can eat the crust on a UP pasty but that wasn’t the case a century ago.
I do eat the crust now but I have a distant memory of eating the middle of a blueberry pie… with my hands. I was very young then; I wouldn’t do that now of course.
You just knocked loose a memory that I would have bet was lost to the ages in my addled brain:
“Chow down, lard ass!”
To me, the enjoyment of pie is reliant upon both excellent filling and excellent crust. An excellent crust should be like my grandmother’s: Light, flaky and flavorful.
I never thought to ask what grandma’s secret was, so I spent many years trying to figure it out. Crisco? No. Butter? Nope. Lard? Yes! YES!! YES!!!
I now make pie crust that is exactly like my grandmother’s. Always homemade, always with lard. Handled as little as possible. Fill it with anything you like. It’s fabulous!
I eat it all.
Did more research and it seems I was handing down ‘fakelore’
Debunking the Cornish Pasty Handle - The Arsenic Alibi
Damn. I hate it when I’m the ignorant one. Thanks!
No, I was the ignorant one.
If it’s a dessert pie or a meat pie, I clean my plate. If it’s a four-day old pizza pie, I leave the bones.
You may have been, but so was I, because I believed it, too.
BTW, in a county fair-type blueberry pie* eating competition, are the contestants required to eat the crusts?
*or whatever type of fruit pie is being featured
I do like eating the crust, with as much gusto as the filling if it’s a good crust, including the “handle” crimped part.
I won’t eat the crimped part if it’s too dark (i.e., actually burnt, not merely dark brown) or if it’s badly made (too pasty, too chewy, etc.) Generally I’ll eat whatever I can tolerate, even if I won’t really enjoy it, because I maintain an irrational hatred of wasting food.
Answer is YES, except any burnt parts. I love the crust maybe even more than the filling, although, we’re talking about somebody whose favorite part of a ‘Pop Tart’ are the edges.
My mom made extra crust for “pie cookies” — sprinkle cinnamon and sugar and roll them up (about an inch and a half long and half an inch in diameter)
Yum
Brian
If I eat the slice from tip to crust, leaving only the crust, then the only reason I eat it is because it’s there sitting on my plate and it would be less convenient to find a way to get rid of it. That’s whether or not it’s homemade or burnt or whatever.
On the other hand, if I can take the last few bites of the filling along with a tiny bit of edge crust with each bite, that provides an interesting contrast, so in that case I get more pleasure from eating the crust than not.
When my wife and I eat sweet pie (Kuchen) my wife often disdains the outer crust and I beg for it.
Us too. Roll the whole piece up and cut into slices. Ours were over an inch in diameter though,
When my mother made a pie for dessert, I would eat all of the filling (it was good), then eat the good part - the crust. I also loved when she baked the leftover pie crust after sprinkling it with sugar and cinammon. Sometimes I would skip the pie and claim the crust for dessert.
I eat the crust from pizza and pies alike, but my sister doesn’t. Well, she’ll eat pizza crust if it’s stuffed crust.