From Our Kitchen
Recipes from Elowen, pastry chef at Salt Wind Catering. Proper Cornish food — pasties, saffron buns, crab linguine, stargazey pie — written for home cooks who want the real thing.
13 recipes
A proper Cornish pasty is not a pie. It is not a "pasty-style" snack from a service station. It is raw skirt steak, sliced waxy potato, sliced swede and onion, seasoned well, folded into shortcrust pastry and crimped along the top. That is it. No pre-cooking. No gravy. No added vegetables. This is the recipe.
Cornish lamb is some of the finest in Britain — the animals graze on coastal clifftops and moorland pasture, which gives the meat a clean, mineral sweetness. This is a simple, honest braise: shoulder of lamb slow-cooked with swede, carrot, potato and rosemary until the meat falls from the bone. It is a winter dish and it is exceptional.
Cornish fudge is sold at every gift shop in the county and most of it is not worth eating. Properly made fudge — with actual Cornish clotted cream, butter and sugar cooked to the soft-ball stage — is a completely different thing. It is dense, slightly grainy in the best way, and rich without being sickly. This is how it is made.
Stargazey pie is a Cornish legend — a deep-dish fish pie with whole pilchards or sardines baked into the pastry so their heads poke through the crust, gazing upward at the sky. It comes from Mousehole in West Cornwall and is traditionally eaten on Tom Bawcock's Eve, 23rd December. This is the recipe: fish heads gazing out of a golden pastry crust, just as they should be.
Where the saffron bun is a celebration snack, the saffron cake is a keeping cake — a large, enriched loaf studded with currants, mixed peel and cherries, fragrant with saffron, that improves over several days wrapped in greaseproof paper. It is the cake that sat on every Cornish farmhouse table for generations. This is the proper version.
September in Cornwall means the hedgerows are full of damsons and the orchards are dropping windfalls you can barely give away. This chutney uses both — sharp Bramley apples and tart damsons slow-cooked with cider vinegar, brown sugar, onions and warm spice. It jars beautifully, keeps for a year, and is what a Cornish ploughman's is built around.
Curing salmon at home is easier than it sounds and the result is spectacularly better than anything you can buy. This version uses Tarquin's Cornish Gin — made in Wadebridge from foraged botanicals including fresh-picked violets — along with lemon zest, dill and salt. The cure takes 48 hours and produces silky, jewel-coloured salmon that keeps for up to 5 days in the fridge.
Elder trees flower in Cornwall in May and June, lining the lanes and hedgerows with clusters of cream-white blossom that smell like the best version of summer. Pick them on a dry, sunny day and you have the base for a cordial that tastes nothing like the supermarket version. This is one of those recipes that makes people ask if you actually made it yourself.
Cauliflower cheese is a British institution. Made with Cornish Yarg — the nettle-wrapped semi-hard cheese made near Penryn — it becomes something else entirely. The yarg melts into a sauce with a gentle creaminess and a slightly earthy, herbaceous note from the nettles. This is a proper side dish or a main event in its own right.
In Cornwall, you put the jam on first. Then the clotted cream. That is not up for debate. This is the classic Cornish cream tea scone recipe — light, barely sweet, with a good rise and a slight crust on top. The clotted cream should be thick enough to stand a teaspoon in. The jam should be strawberry. The debate should end.
Proper crab cakes are mostly crab — not mostly breadcrumbs with a hint of crab. These use fresh picked Cornish white crab meat bound with just enough to hold them together, seasoned with lemon zest, chives and a little Dijon, then pan-fried in butter until golden. Served with a quick samphire and crème fraîche alongside.
Cornish saffron buns are one of the oldest baked goods in Britain — saffron was traded into Cornwall via the tin and copper trade routes centuries before it reached the rest of the country. These are soft, lightly spiced milk buns with a vivid yellow crumb, studded with currants and mixed peel. They are called revel buns in West Cornwall and are still made for feast days.
Fresh Cornish crab, linguine, lemon, chilli and a knob of proper Cornish butter. This is one of those recipes that sounds fancy but takes under 20 minutes and tastes like you're eating at the harbour edge in St Ives. White crab meat only — the brown meat goes into a sauce you'll want to eat straight from the pan.
