Bill and Ted go to Greggs

The whole meat-in-pastry thing continues to baffle and bemuse the New World. My eye having been caught by reference to ‘The Pasty Shack’, a modest emporium of said comestible in Sacramento, in this month’s Sunset magazine, I went a-Googling for a website. I found it, only to be somewhat disappointed by its rudimentary nature, but was delighted on the way to find an enthusiastic review in sactosaurus:

This place is grub! You gotta check them out! They make these little things called “pasties” – it’s like meat rolled in bread or flour and then cooked in the oven.

Whoa, dude! And those sausage roll deals are like, totally tubular.

According to the Sacramento News & Review, the proprietor of The Pasty Shack is himself none-too-clear on the whole pasty heritage:

Where did the pasty come from?

The origin of it is from Cornwall, England. It’s what the miners would take to work along with their coffee and they’d go down these mineshafts. The pasty was whatever was left over in their refrigerator put into pie dough.

I do like the idea of those early-nineteenth century tin miners standing in front of the fridge, bathed in the cool glow, pondering which of the leftovers from the previous night’s dinner party they’d whip into that day’s lunch, to be washed down with a frothy vanilla latte perhaps.

They go way back, of course. And I do miss them.