A pasty, known in Cornish dialect as tiddy / teddy oggy / oggin, and occasionally as pasty in the US, is a filled pastry case, frequently linked with Cornwall in Britain. It is different from a pie as it is manufactured by putting the filling on a flat pastry shape, customarily a circle, and folding it to wrap the filling, crimping the edge to form a seal. The result is a raised semi-circular package. The standard Cornish pasty is full of meat, chopped potato, swede (sometimes called a rutabaga) and onion, and baked. Pasties with many alternative fillings are made; some shops concentrate on selling all kinds of pasties. In a correct pasty, the filling ingredients mustn't ever be cooked before they're wrapped up in the pastry surrounding; that's the major difference between a pasty and an empanada.

You could call a Cornish pasty one of the first junk foods, since they were made to be carried by miners who'd have them as their sole meal of the day. Today, you will most frequently find them in English bars and to a certain amount in Irish boozers too. You're also certain to find them in America at UK electrified restaurants or boozers and as a popular choice at Renaissance carnivals and Scottish Games. Fridge sections in UK grocers’ stores may carry pasties in a selection of tastes, some including cheese, vegetarian, and many beef selections.

The true Cornish pasty, though, is nearly always a mix of beef, onions and potatoes, with a little pepper for seasoning. Relying on the recipe, the Cornish pasty can have a moderately dry taste. In bars and restaurants, you might find them served crowned with brown gravy to dampen the dish. Crust on the pasty varies too. Some are made from the more fragile puff pastry, though this isn't normal, while others are made from easy piecrust. The early pasties wouldn't have featured a fragile crust, but instead a reasonably thick one, since the Cornish pasty frequently had to survive being carried, maybe for most of the day, in coarse conditions. Overworking the crust could help a pasty survive being dropped, and allegedly a good pasty was considered so if you might drop it down a mineshaft and retrieve it untouched. This isn't to assert that most pasties would be purposively dropped.

In reality miners had little ovens in which all of the pasties brought to work might be stored and kept toasty. Since it was sometimes the only meal miners would have during awful and interminable hours of work, the pasty needed to be filling and hearty enough to endure such cruel work conditions. If you try a Cornish pasty, you will note the standard type is sort of filling, even tho a little dry if not crowned with gravy, or as some like, ketchup. There are a number of beef pies in other cultures quite like the pasty.

Particularly, empanadas, though they frequently contain more spicy beef, are virtually matching in size and shape to the Cornish pasty. Another similar dish is calzone, though calzones are sometimes stuffed with cheese and tasty meat, and are rather more firmly related to pizza.