Skip to main content
Main

Cornish Pasties

A pastry filled with sliced potatoes and thinly sliced fresh meat, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Potato and meat work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 786 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Cornish Pasties

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Roll out the pastry thinly.

  2. Cut the pastry into rounds.

Fill and seal

  1. Place the meat and potato mixture on one half of each round.

  2. Wet the edges of the pastry with water.

  3. Fold over the pastry to enclose the filling and pinch the edges to seal.

  4. Prick the top of each pasty with a fork.

Bake and serve

  1. Brush the tops with beaten egg.

  2. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 1 to 1.5 hours.

  3. Serve hot or cold.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Potato + meattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together786 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  2. Meat + eggtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Potato + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,978 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Short pastry
Forms a sturdy, flaky case that encloses the filling and bakes golden.
Fresh meat
Provides the main filling, cooking through in the oven while staying juicy.
Potatoes
Add starch and body to the filling, cooking into soft, tender pieces.
Egg
Brushed on top, it promotes browning and a glossy finish.

The step that matters

Pinching the edges to seal. If the edges are not wet and firmly pinched, steam expanding during baking can force the seam open and let juices leak out, leaving the filling dry and the pastry soggy underneath.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, egg):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Mustardfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipesSweet Potato CroquettesSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipes