How Cornish is the Cornish pasty?

The Cornish pasty has been granted 'Protected Geographical Indication' (PGI) status by the European Commission. What does this mean?
Henceforward a Cornish pasty is a savoury, D-shaped pasty which is filled with beef, vegetables and seasonings. Any sort of pastry can be used provided it is savoury and 'robust enough to retain shape throughout the cooking, cooling and handling process and serves to avoid splitting or cracking.' The pastry is crimped by hand or mechanically 'to one side, and never on top'.
A Cornish pasty must contain not less then 25% vegetables which must be sliced or diced potato, swede/turnip and onion only, not less than 12.5% meat which must be minced or diced beef and seasonings. No other types of meat or vegetables or any artificial additives can be used and all filling ingredients must be uncooked at the time of sealing the product.
And to be called a Cornish pasty the product must be assembled in the designated area of Cornwall.

Now the European Commission don't go around the countryside looking for things to classify, chances are they would never have heard of the Cornish pasty if it hadn't been for the Cornish Pasty Association. And who are they? Well you might not be entirely surprised to learn that they are a group of Cornish pasty makers who just happen to all be in Cornwall and are concerned 'to protect the quality and the reputation of the Cornish pasty and to stop consumers being misled by pasty makers who trade off the value of the name without producing a genuine product.' They believe 'protection of the Cornish pasty is necessary in order to safeguard the heritage of the Cornish pasty, the future of the industry and the reputation of the product.'

Safeguarding traditional foodstuffs and the heritage of their production is all part of the modern nostalgia for the past, a back lash against the commercialisation of food production and the fear that local traditions and even national identities will disappear into the blandness of globalisation. In Cornwall the pasty is historically associated with the mining industry. It was a neat, convenient and economical meal for the labouring man. The crimped edge was held by the miner as he ate and then discarded because contaminated with the grime from his hands. So the pasty is an unashamedly proletarian foodstuff, a reminder of hard times and hard work. Now that the mining industry in Cornwall is no more (although the mining landscape has been granted World Heritage Status) the poor pasty becomes a potent symbol of the 'good old days' albeit one which is commercialised and now standardised.

Will being granted PGI achieve the stated aims of the Cornish Pasty Association? Simply standardising the ingredients is surely no guarantee of the quality of the finished product. To qualify to carry a Cornish pasty logo, proof of authenticity, there is no requirement that the raw ingredients be sourced from within Cornwall, so there is no suggestion, for example, that turnips grown in Cornish soil are essential to the final flavour. Many consumers are unlikely to find a pasty made with puff pastry equal in quality to one made with shortcrust pastry (made with lard of course), and many consumers already consider that a pasty made with mince in highly inferior to one made with diced beef whether made in Cornwall or not. In fact to qualify as Cornish it is only 'the assembly of the pasties in preparation for baking' which must take place in the designated area, the actual baking does not have to be done in Cornwall. So what's Cornish about the Cornish pasty?
 Is it cynical to suggest that the Cornish Pasty Association is less interested in protecting the good name of the pasty and more interested in the future of the industry in Cornwall and ensuring that 'consumers willing to pay a premium price for a genuine article' will make an appropriate contribution to the Cornish economy?

Safeguarding tradition is something that Cornish families have been doing for centuries and Cornish pasties are consumed in countries around the world. Does it matter that some of them may contain carrots and have the crimping on the top rather than at the side? Perhaps it is no bad thing that there is some standardised recipe for a Cornish pasty just so that no one ever gets the idea that pastry stuffed with Tandoori chicken might have originated in Cornwall but to suggest that only pasties which are made to that recipe AND 'assembled' in Cornwall can rightfully be called Cornish pasties seems – well at least odd, if not down right silly.
 
For more on the Cornish pasty and what some people think of the granting of PGI status see here and here
The Cornish Pasty Association are here and you can read their application for PGI status here and click on the link.
The images above are from the Cornish Pasty Association website.

On discovering Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher

This photograph of M. F. K. Fisher in her study, April 28 1971 by Robert Drew,
 appeared in the Guardian, 11 August 2010.

'Mrs. Fisher is as talented a writer as she is a cook. Indeed, I do not know of anyone in the United States today who writes better prose. If a reader wishes to test this assertion, let him turn to the first three pages of the section in An Alphabet for Gourmets entitled I is for Innocence.'

So says W. H. Auden, writing in 1963, in his introduction to The Art of Eating, a compilation of five of M.F.K. Fisher's books – Serve it Forth (1937), Consider the Oyster (1941), How to Cook a Wolf (1942), The Gastronomical Me (1943) and An Alphabet for Gourmets (1949). As a newcomer to Mrs.Fisher's prose, I decided I should begin by testing it as suggested.

In ' I is for Innocence' she writes of the ghastliest meal of her life which was prepared for her by a friend she describes as 'a large, greedy and basically unthinking man'. The point of the story is that food prepared with some 'warmth and understanding', with honesty and generosity will always please even if the food itself is dreadful. Mrs. Fisher asserts that  'A truly innocent cook or host is never guilty of the great sin of pretension, while many an ignorant one errs hideously in this direction'. And a man capable of pretension is not only cheating his guests but is also 'incapable of telling the truth to himself'. Strong stuff, but Mrs. Fisher is nothing if not opinionated.
I wouldn't have said that the three pages of this anecdote represented the very best of her writing but then I am no W. H. Auden, nor, to be truthful, am I a fan of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher. I admit this with some trepidation given the praise lavished on her by the likes of Paul Levy, Allan Davidson, Jane Grigson and a host of other writers. On the whole I found her prose dense and convoluted and a bit obscure. There is something about the tone of her writing that smacks of smugness and superiority which made me think of her as rather uncharitable and unsentimental. Would you say of someone who is a friend that they were 'large' and 'greedy' and 'basically unthinking'? Would you, to prove a point, tell the world that this man produced the ghastliest food you had ever eaten? So whilst I understand and appreciate what she is getting at in 'I is for Innocence' I feel very uncomfortable with the way she goes about it. It's not what she says that I object to, just the way that she says it.
Some of her pieces, particularly those in The Gastronomical Me, are highly personal, almost embarrassingly so, but at the same time strangely impersonal. She tells you just so much and no more so that many of the stories are inconclusive and you find yourself wondering what it was all about. Obviously fiercely independent she paints a portrait of herself as both feminine and staunchly feminist but somehow never seems to quite let you see her real self.
That's not to say that she doesn't have a way with words and she can tell a good story, more importantly she has some good stories to tell but in the end I felt unwelcome. I didn't feel that we had been on the journey together or that she cared much about her reader. Overall the tone of much of her prose struck me as not just self-confident but studied  and self-indulgent.
Friends tried to convince me that I was the one being ungenerous, that perhaps I should allow for the writing having dated somewhat, and of course for every one of my negatives they were able to point to pages of positives, to expressive and perceptive passages, to eloquent descriptions and witty analogies.
Whilst I could see what they are getting at I still felt disappointed. Perhaps Mary Frances and I were just not on the same wavelength. I searched to find anyone who agreed with me and then I found Gay Bilson's admission that she finds M. F. K. Fisher's prose 'toe-curling' and objects to 'an ever-present sense of self-congratulation' in Fisher's writing*. Like Gay Bilson I was relieved to find that there is a 'cadre' of others prepared to admit foodie heresy.
I was left wondering what it was I had expected and what it was I wanted from food writing. The simple answer of course is that good food writing should just be good writing, and that good writing is about words and not about food. Mrs. Fisher's oft quoted reasons for writing about food make it clear that she sees herself as a writer not as a food writer.** Food writing is writing about food; food writers are writers who write about food. But, as any member of a book group will tell you, one person's idea of good writing is another person's complete waste of time. Ultimately you either like it or you don't.

*Plenty. Digressions on Food. Lantern, 2004

**In the forward to The Gastronomical Me she writes

'People ask me: Why do you write about food and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?

They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.

The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it...and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied...and it is all one.'

Lumberjack Cake?

Today I made Lumberjack cake - following the tried and true recipe on the Women's Weekly recipe card - it's one of my staples. Always a success, always enjoyed and easy enough to put together for afternoon tea so long as you don't leave it too late to prepare the dates. But why is it called Lumberjack cake?
Searching the Internet doesn't provide any clues other than that it is sometimes referred to as 'Loggers cake'. But what does it have to do with lumberjacks or loggers? The specific ingredients which make this cake different to any other - dates, apples and coconut - aren't specific to lumberjacks, are they? Nor are they likely to be the sort of staples you would expect to find in a logging camp, are they? It's all just a little bit mysterious.
Even Python lumberjacks don't eat cake, well not on Wednesdays anyway.

I'm a Lumberjack and I'm okay,

I sleep all night and I work all day

I cut down trees, I eat my lunch

I go to the lavatory

On Wednesdays I go shopping

And have buttered scones for tea

The Bocuse d'Or 2011

 The Bocuse what? you might ask - although you would know all about it if you had read this post from 2009 (which discusses a film about the Spanish 2007 bid and also explains the workings of the competition). While at home Queenslanders have been a bit preoccupied with floods over in France one of their number has been flying the Australian flag at the Bocuse d'Or in Lyon, France. You wouldn't know much about this event if you relied on the Australian press  (I could only find one recent reference here) but it seems to be taken pretty seriously in Europe and increasingly so in the USA.
 This year the 24 contestants had to prepare a meat platter, using two saddles of lamb, including the kidneys, and one shoulder, and a seafood platter using two monkfish, twenty langoustines and four crabs. The end results are presented on huge platters and paraded before the 24 judges, 12 of who sample the meat dishes and the other 12 taste the fish.
 What remains a bit of a mystery  is what the judges are looking for. The Americans were very disappointed with their performance, coming 10th, and attribute their lack of success to not understanding the 'game', 'the defined game in the way that the food should be presented'. Given that any bid doesn't come cheaply it would seem fundamental to understand what is expected before competing. Obviously all the chefs who enter know how to cook so is the competition less to do with execution and more about style?  Apparently the winning platter needs to demonstrate passion and originality and be a true expression of the chef.
The winning team from Denmark scored 1014 points; only six other teams scored more than 900; the Americans scored 864. Of the thirteen competitions held since 1987 France has won six times and Norway four times. The place getters have always been European or Scandinavian teams with the exception of Singapore who scored a bronze in 1989. Clearly some contestants have a better idea of what the judges are looking for than others in particular Rasmus Kofoed who won gold for Denmark this year, silver in 2007 and bronze in 2005!
This clip sums up his approach to the 'game'


What I don't really understand is what the chefs gain from this sort of contest. As Grant Achatz points out competition cooking has little or nothing to do with restaurant cooking and, despite the fact that he was a judge of the Bocuse d'Or USA which chose the team to go on to Lyon this year, he quite bluntly says

'Historically, most chefs in the U.S. could not see the benefit of devoting time and energy to train for a competition that would not further their careers, even if they did win.'

Our local boy was Russell Clarke, senior sous chef at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre. Perhaps one of the reasons why there hasn't been much publicity of the event here has something to do with the result - the Australians came in at number 20 with a score of 711.

For information about the Bocuse d'Or see here
For Grant Achatz on the Bocuse d"or USA see here
For Michael Ruhlman's coverage of the 2011 event see here, here and here
For another first hand report on the US bid see here, and for a report on how the British team fared see here


And if anyone can tell me how to embed a YouTube video so that it doesn't take over the whole page I would be forever grateful.