A historian has claimed that stories of how miners traditionally ate pasties are 'false'.
That's right. Glyn Hughes, a food history researcher, said tales about Cornish tin miners using the pasty's crust as a handle are completely made up.
He appeared on Gregg Wallace's Inside the Factory tonight (which you can watch on iPlayer here), alongside fellow historian Ruth Goodman, as the team learned about traditional pasties at Callington's Ginsters factory.
Glyn explained that it was previously thought that tin miners used the crimp as a*handle*to hold on to while eating, so that they didn't poison themselves with arsenic or tin oil that might be on their fingers from working.
But he revealed that pictures from as far back as the 1890s - showed that actually, miners ate pasties from cloth bags.
Asked if there was any historical evidence of miners using the crimp as a handle, Glyn added: "We’ve been back through literally thousands and thousands of newspapers and magazines going back to the 18th Century and we can find absolutely no mention of it anywhere."
https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/ce...tually-4029003