The Cornish Pasty Claim About an Arsenic Handle

Tourists in Cornwall are frequently told that the pasty’s thick side-crimp was an industrial safety device. The story claims the crust served as a disposable handle, designed to prevent arsenic from the miner’s fingers from entering his food. It is a compelling narrative that justifies the modern law’s insistence on side-crimping. There is just one problem with this explanation… the miners themselves do not seem to have known about it. A review of photographic archives and estimated daily energy needs suggests the ‘Arsenic Alibi’ is a modern myth used to sanitise a working-class survival tool. (See Part 1: The Ingredient Audit for the economic investigation).

What the Photos Show Miners Actually Holding

The official application for Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status explicitly links the Cornish pasty’s form to function. The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) documents state that the side crimp evolved specifically as a handle to be discarded to avoid arsenic or tin contamination. This functional narrative provides the historical legitimacy required for the legal protection of the ‘D’ shape. It frames the pastry configuration as a necessary adaptation to the toxic environment of the 19th-century mine.

Photographic evidence from the era presents a different reality. The J.C. Burrow collection, which documents Cornish mining life in 1893, contains numerous images of miners at lunch. In these photographs, the men are frequently depicted holding their pasties wrapped in muslin or paper bags, known locally as Crib Bags. The bag served as the primary barrier against contamination. The miner held the food through the cloth or paper rather than by a sacrificial crust handle.

The logic is simple, the bag did the work. If a miner held a pasty by a ‘crust handle’ with arsenic-covered hands, the dust was still dangerously close to the food. The crib bag offered a much safer solution, isolating the entire meal until the moment it was eaten.

Food historian Glyn Hughes challenged the handle theory after conducting a review of thousands of newspapers and magazines from the 18th and 19th centuries. Hughes found ‘absolutely no mention’ of the practice where miners discarded the crust. The first references to this specific habit appear much later in the historical record. This absence suggests the story is an example of Fakelore, a retrospective legend created to add romance or logic to a tradition that may have had more mundane origins.

Would Miners Really Throw Away That Much Food?

The economic reality of the 19th-century miner further undermines the ‘disposable crust’ theory. A miner working underground in high temperatures performed strenuous manual labour, burning between 3,000 and 4,000 calories a day. In the ‘feast or fast’ economy described by Dr Philip Vincent in 1862, where meat was a luxury and wages were volatile, every calorie was a vital resource.

That thick crimp is solid pastry, dense with flour and lard. The crimp was edible fuel as much as it was grip.

For a labourer working on the edge of poverty, throwing away 15 per cent of his lunch wasn’t a safety measure, it would have been an unthinkable waste of energy. The caloric density of the crust was an asset rather than a waste product.

While arsenic toxicity was a genuine danger in Cornish mines, the ‘discard rule’ may have been a limited practice specific to the most hazardous environments. Arsenic calciners, where the ore was roasted to remove impurities, presented an extreme toxicity risk compared to general tin extraction. It is possible that the practice existed in these specific zones and was later extrapolated to apply to all miners in popular folklore.

We lack the toxicological data to confirm if the crust actually absorbed sufficient arsenic to be fatal, or if the risk was primarily respiratory.

Side Crimp Versus Top Crimp

The PGI specification is rigid regarding the architecture of the Cornish pasty. It states the product must be ‘D’ shaped and crimped on one side, never on top. This rule creates a binary distinction between the ‘Cornish’ pasty (side crimp) and the ‘Devon’ pasty (top crimp).

The rule has teeth. A Cornish baker today who uses a top crimp is legally banned from calling their product a ‘Cornish Pasty’. Yet archival images from the late 19th century show that the miners themselves didn’t follow this rule. Photographs of Cornish miners, including those in the Burrow collection, show men consuming pasties with crimps that appear on the top or are ambiguous in their placement. The visual record does not support the assertion that the side crimp was the only traditional method used in Cornwall.

Local testimony supports the photographic evidence.

Ann Muller of the Lizard Pasty Shop has contested the PGI definition, stating that her grandmother always top-crimped. Families and bakeries likely developed their own styles based on oven shape and sealing preference rather than county allegiance. Some bakers argue that a top crimp allows for a fuller filling and a more secure seal to prevent gravy leakage. The PGI has effectively ceded the top crimp to Devon to create a clear market distinction, disenfranchising Cornish bakers who maintain the top-crimp tradition.

The ‘Sweet End’ Story

A persistent legend surrounds the ‘dual-purpose’ pasty. This variant reportedly contained a savoury filling at one end and a sweet filling, such as jam or apple, at the other. It is a favourite story of tourism guides, offering a complete meal in a single crust. While often cited in oral histories, physical or documentary evidence for this practice in Cornwall is scarce.

The dual-filling format is physically proven elsewhere.

The Bedfordshire Clanger, a suet dumpling from a neighbouring county, is the archetype of the savoury-sweet meal. The confusion may stem from a conflation of these two regional traditions.

The strongest link to a Cornish ‘sweet end’ comes from the Parys Mountain copper mines in Anglesey, Wales.

Cornish miners migrated to Anglesey in the 18th and 19th centuries to work the copper deposits. Records from this community describe a pasty with a ‘part-savoury, part-sweet’ filling. This suggests the sweet end may have been an innovation of the Diaspora, developed by migrant miners adapting to new locations, rather than a universal standard in Cornwall itself. The PGI definition makes no allowance for this format, classifying it as non-compliant.

What the Diaspora Recipes Preserve

When the Cornish mining industry declined in the late 19th century, thousands of miners emigrated to the USA, Mexico, and Australia. These communities often preserved the traditions of the time, freezing them in ‘Culinary Amber’ while the homeland modernised. Their recipes provide a control group for what the pasty looked like before 20th-century standardisation.

In Real del Monte, Mexico, the Cornish miner’s lunch lives on as the paste.

Introduced in the 1820s, the recipe adapted to its new home, absorbing local ingredients like mole and pineapple. Crucially, this timeline predates the Victorian obsession with ‘beef and swede’. The Mexican tradition ignores the rigid formula mandated by modern law, proving that the original migrants were far more pragmatic about their fillings than the PGI admits.

The evidence from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is even more specific. Here, the pasty remains a cultural staple. Michigan pasties invariably include rutabaga (swede) but also frequently include carrot. Many diaspora recipes also call for a mix of beef and pork. The fact that carrots and mixed meats survived in Michigan kitchens suggests they were standard in Cornish ones before the migrants left. The modern ‘no carrot’ rule looks less like history and more like a later affectation that hardened into dogma.

What This Suggests About the Modern Cornish Pasty Story

The PGI status leans hard on ‘Fakelore’. The ‘Arsenic Alibi’ provides a convenient cover story for the side crimp, distracting us from the fact that the ban on top-crimping is historically baseless. By upgrading a baking preference into a piece of industrial safety gear, the regulations invent a link between the modern product and the historical miner that simply wasn’t there.

This process acts as a ‘Class Filter’.

The PGI protects the idea of the pasty romantic and industrial rather than the reality, which was messy and often vegetarian. The authentic 19th-century pasty was a vessel for whatever was available. It contained pork, fish, carrots, and perhaps even jam, and it was crimped however the baker saw fit.

The diaspora communities in Mexico and the USA may hold a stronger claim to the 19th-century miner’s pasty than the legally protected version sold in Cornwall today. They kept the pork and the carrots long after the modern law erased them. The PGI saved the brand, but the cost was the history.

Sources

Sources include: the J.C. Burrow photographic collection (1893) documenting Cornish mining life; DEFRA documentation regarding the ‘functional’ origins of the pasty shape; research by food historian Glyn Hughes into 18th and 19th-century press records; caloric expenditure estimates for industrial manual labour; oral histories regarding crimping techniques, including testimony from Ann Muller; records from the Parys Mountain copper mines in Anglesey; and comparative culinary data from Cornish diaspora communities in Real del Monte, Mexico, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.