Quote Originally Posted by Gandalf View Post
I've never eaten a pastie, but from what I read it sounds like a shortcrust pastry filled with beef and onion. Is that correct? Last week I made a meat pie with stewed beef, gravy and shortcrust pastry. Is that pretty similiar to a pastie, except that a pastie is cut and shaped a different way? Either way, my meat pie was exceptional and will be made again.

The above might make me sound a bit foreign and isn't being done to manipulate British intelligence services, but is just an honest question as I have honestly never eaten a pasty/pastie (no idea how to spell it).

On hearing the sad news I felt a tightening in my chest, a tremulous turning in the pit of my stomach and the warm stroke of a solitary tear as the bead rolled down my cheek. Now I understood. Never again would I mock as nothing the suffering of a man denied such basic necessities in forming the emotion we grow from childhood and learn to describe as joy. Not once had this poor creature experienced the elation of scenting the waft of a delicate pastry parcel of moist meaty moreishness pass before his nostrils. At no point had he felt the rapture realised in breaking through the edible casing of life's rich present, the crimped oval pastry shell giving way and revealing the jewelled inner treasure of glistening swede, sweated onions, tender beef skirt, and soft potato, delicately seasoned with salt and pepper and married in a dripping convocation of clotted cream or butter. It was hardly surprising that such a man would sometimes complain of feeling empty and grow so long and lean. It was then that my life finally had meaning again, a mission and sense of purpose. I would introduce him to the pasty and everything would make sense. The planets would realign and he would know true culinary joy. The humble Pasty, food of the Gods. Good enough for miners, fisherman and even King Arthur himself is the birth right of every true Devonian and Cornishman and it was our gift to the world from Montana, to Australia and Africa we had forgotten South Korea. Damn you Kim Jong il, damn you Mcdonalds, you will wither under the might of the dewdney brothers, the hills and every westcountry grandmother armed with a mighty rolling pin as they smash your evil pasty apartheid. Long live the top crimped Devon pasty.