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A pasty tour of Cornwall

A pasty tour of Cornwall

Where can you buy the best pasties? Visitors will find a Cornish pasty is much more than a long meat pie - it's a proud part of Cornish culture and a tourist attraction in its own right.

Old Mrs Trethewey turned the tiny hall of her tiny cottage into a makeshift pasty shop every lunchtime. She would push a table across her doorway and set up the tray of hot fresh pasties she’d baked that morning. A steady stream of working men would be greeted with a cheery “hello my lover” and disappear with a pasty in a white paper bag. As an outsider I felt proud to have discovered Mrs Trethewey’s homespun bakery in the back streets of St Austell.

On my first visit I expected someone to shout: “Hey, you can’t have one of they - yoo’m not proper Cornish!” But as I became a trusted regular I felt like I’d passed some arcane initiation to England’s most separatist county. That’s because in Cornwall the pasty shop is not just a place where you buy bread and cakes, just as the pasty is so much more than simply a long meat pie.

The “oggie” – as it's known to locals – is a cornerstone of the history, culture and sense of sheer Cornishness. Mrs Trethewey’s cottage shop may have disappeared since I was a young journalist in Cornwall but the county still has plenty of handmade pasty shops that give visitors a colourful snapshot of Cornish life. Visiting a real pasty-maker should be part of every visitor's holiday.

Pasties may be eated all over the world but the Cornish feel they own the rights to the original. Be warned however that even in Cornwall there’s a world of difference between a proper pasty experience and grabbing a cellophane wrapped pasty from the nearest garage shop. “Some things passing as pasties are truly appalling,” shudders Crantock Bakery’s Sales and Marketing Manager Debbie Laity.

So here’s my guide to some of the county’s the most worthwhile pasty places – an proper pasty tour of Cornwall.



The Lizard Pasty Shop
Beacon Terrace, The Lizard, Cornwall
01326 290889
www.connexions.co.uk/lizardpasty
You can’t miss Ann Muller’s homemade pasty shop – it’s a bright yellow and adjoins her house in England’s most southerly village, overlooking the Lizard Rock lighthouse.

Ann learnt pasty-making from her mother who wrote a book about them. "Making pasties is something all the women in my mother's Cornish family traditionally did,” says Ann. She began making pasties for neighbours "who'd bring round fish they'd caught or vegetables they'd grown. They treated my living room like a waiting room, sitting around gossiping over cups of tea waiting for the pasties to come out of the oven.”

Ann and her mother started selling pasties from a stall in the nearby market town of Helston, eventually they transformed the garage of Ann’s house into a pasty kitchen and shop. Since then Ann has won awards for her pasties and appeared in Caterer & Hotelkeeper and the BBC Food Programme. Ann claims her customers have included Jenny Agutter and Rodney Bewes.

When visitors squeeze into her shop, she happily plays up to her role as champion of the Cornish pasty.
“I’ve become a bit of a celebrity and the shop has become a bit of a Mecca,” she booms in her Cornish accent. "I even give classes on my counter top. People from all over the world want to sample an authentic pasty and see how one is made. I make them up front as a free demonstration. I must be the only pasty school in the world."

Ann hit the headlines three years ago when she was quoted widely in a transatlantic war of words over the merits of the pasty. Ann was roped in as the champion of the pasty to reply to comments by US food critic William Grimes who said the pasty was “only fit for a doorstop”.

Ann subsequently defended the pasty in radio programmes and newspapers throughout the country. "I appeal to the Cornish in America - there are lots of American-Cornish groups - and tell them that America was made strong, probably on pasties that Cornish took to the mining communities,” she said. “Pasties mean so much to Cornish people,” she says. “And I’m hooked on them too.”

Pengenna Hotel
Atlantic Road, Tintagel, Cornwall
01840 770223
www.pengennapasties.co.uk
Canadian settler Jerry Saunders has created a pasty-lover’s dream – a traditional bakery where you can stay upstairs. His unpretentious whitewashed hotel overlooks the rugged Atlantic coast near Tintagel castle. It has two ensuite rooms as well as a cream tea garden, pasty bakery and restaurant to eat them in.

The handmade pasties themselves follow all the rules for making the traditional version and have been exhibited at the Royal Cornwall Show. They’re even available by mail order.

Pengennas also have pasty shops in Bude, Falmouth and St Ives. At all four sites visitors can watch pasties being made by hand.

Choaks
Killigrew Street, Falmouth
01326 312426
Three generations of the Choak family have sold pasties from this little stone terrace house-cum-shop just up from the ferry jetty in Falmouth town centre. Daughter Sarah Choak was manning the ovens when I called: “I make em, bake em and sell em” she laughed over the lunchtime bustle.

Visitors can see Sarah, her dad Charlie or one of their colleagues making and baking the pasties. Charlie – who lives above the shop – is well known in Cornwall as the baker who once baked a two-and-a-half foot long pasty for a Falmouth Festival. More regular produce on sale in the shop includes Cornish saffron cakes and pasties.

Oggie, Oggie Pasty Shops
Falmouth (Arwenack Street and Church Street) and Truro (River Street)
www.crantockbakery.co.uk
Cornwall’s chain of Oggie shops may be the Disneyland of the pasty world but do they provide visitors with a whiff of the traditional pasty experience.

The self-conscious staging includes the green-and-white uniformed staff working in full view of passers-by. See them glazing the pasties with egg wash, put them in the ovens and taking out the baking trays to cool on a rack.

It’s a sight that even the most hardened Cornishman or woman would find difficult to resist. “The smell of freshly baked pasties is part of the theatre that sells the pasty,” explains sales and marketing manager Debbie Laity. “They really are instilled in the history and culture of this county.”

The Oggie shops are the direct outlets of Crantock Bakery, Cornwall’s biggest producer of handmade pasties. Crantock’s, run by brother and sister Frank and Tess Bradshaw, was originally a Newquay butcher's shop. Their pasty sideline eventually took over the business.

Twenty years later Crantocks make 23 different types of savoury pasty – including tuna and sweetcorn, pork and apple and beef and stilton. Their traditional pasty comes in five sizes: pixie, small, medium, large and giant. Crantocks make more than 55,000 pasties a day, and also supply The Famous Penzance Pasty Company’s two shops in Penzance and the Cornish Bakehouse in St Ives and Looe.

© TheTravelEditor.com

Reproduced with the kind permission of TheTravelEditor.com

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