Cornish Pasty v. Curry Puff

The Cornish Pasty is the iconic food of Cornwall. Everywhere we went during our holiday there a few weeks back, the delicious smell of pasties wafted out at us from bakeries and whole shops devoted to the speciality. They are savoury portable meat pies in a distinctive half moon shape. To my Eastern eye, they look like giant curry puffs.

The outer case of the pasty is made of golden brown pastry that crackles and flakes as you bite into it. Its shape comes from folding a large circle of pastry over the filling and braiding the resulting curved edge. The traditional filling is steak and potatoes but these days, there’s lamb and mint and steak & stilton and a whole range more. They have a satisfying, heavy feel in your hand, about the size and weighty book.

Curry puffs are much smaller. They can be the same handbag shape as a pasty or sometimes can look like a fatter and shorter sausage roll. Inside, the filling is made of minced pork, chicken or beef, onions, vegetables and potatoes fried in dry spicy curry. You can get fried puffs with crispy oily pastry or baked ones with flaky puff pastry. Even describing it now makes me drool…. Bizarrely, the best curry puff I’ve had was at the canteen in Singapore General Hospital some years back.

Pasties are really yum on a blustery Cornish day. We shared one in Falmouth as Hurricane Gordon blew itself in across the Atlantic, the sky glowering darkly and the sea sharp and choppy in the bay. The light drizzle was like a sheet of pins thrown at us by the wind. A hot pasty in our hands, steaming in the cold, was just what we needed.

But there is always a slight disappointment in the back of my mind. Tasty as pasties are, they strongly retain their ancient British identity as solid, rather bland but nourishing food. They aren’t - and never will be nor should be - spicy, meaty curry puffs wafting of garlic and coriander and burning your mouth with the more pugnacious taste of the East. Sigh. I do miss a good curry puff eaten in the sweltering heat of a street market…

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Can you tell which is the pic of Cornish Pasties and which of Curry Puffs?

Picture A

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Picture B

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Answer: A = Curry Puffs; B = Cornish Pasties