dyirbal’s blog

Cornish Pastie

In my opinion, Cornish pasties should be made illegal. The reasons are obvious when you think about it.The Cornish pastie was conceived as a durable foodstuff by the wives of Cornish tin miners. What they were looking to create was a portable lunch that would survive a drop of several hundred feet down a mine shaft, because that’s exactly how the meal was delivered.I imagine that in the prototype stages, things got very messy. Likely as not, the Cornish women first experimented by dropping assorted comestibles, such as egg and chips, steak and kidney pies, and egg and bacon quiches, to assess their survivability rating. None of them stood much chance. Most probably, by the end of the working week, the miners would have to dig themselves out through mounds of suet, rancid meat, and rotting vegetables. It’s only when the by now classic pastry clamshell design was perfected that matters improved. But only temporarily.Yes, it was now possible to deliver a fairly indestructible lunch. At what cost, though?If you’ve got, say, 60 miners working underground, that’s 60 pasties that are going to be descending at high velocity come lunch break. It’s inevitable that a few miners were accidentally killed in the noontime blitzkriegs. That explains all the “Ian Trethowan – Killed by a pastie, 1876″ tombstones you see in places like Mousehole and St Agnes. It wasn’t food poisoning that did away with them, as many imagine. It was a fractured skull.But even if they survived the pastie barrage, there was another problem: How, in the dim light of a tin mine, did they identify which pastie was intended for whom? I’d say it was damn near impossible. As a result, many underground fights would break out as miners argued over pastie provenance, leading to more death, destruction, and in extreme cases, the closure of the mine itself.Little wonder that most Cornish tin mines are now derelict. We must therefore ban the pastie before it does away with any more of the UK’s industries.

deadlier than it looks
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