Nostalgia is the most powerful seasoning!
The Cornish pasty is a simple and delicious English lunch item: a pastry wrapper filled with chopped meat and vegetables. It originated in Cornwall, where it served workers heading off to the mines both as their meal itself and as the lunch box in which to carry it.
These pasties were prompted by my discovery last week - at Ra'anana's famous "Meatland" which has all sorts of food items you can't find elsewhere in Israel - of ready-made empanada wraps. So I suppose they have at least as much claim to being "empanadas" as they do to being "pasties". In any event, they enable me to revel in the name "pasty", which I find so evocative, even if these weren't pasties in the purest sense.
I stir-fried onions, potatoes, carrots, peas and courgettes, in addition to the beef mince, and flavoured the filling with sage, pepper, and a hint of rosemary.
I should probably have used a more fatty mince. That way the filling would have bound together better, enabling me to stuff the patties more fully. I once heard pasties described as "overstuffed purses" - and that's ideally how they should look.
But they were delicious. The ready-made pastry was perfect, and I was complimented on their appealing appearance.
