A Cornish pasty was built so that a man a mile underground with arsenic on his hands could eat a hot dinner holding it by a handle he then threw away. The crust is the point. A proper one is shortcrust rolled thick enough to survive a shift in a tin miner's jacket, crimped along one side into a thick rope of pastry that stays cold while the middle stays hot. The miner held the crimp, ate the rest, and dropped the crimp down the shaft for the knockers, the spirits of the mine, which was the polite name for keeping the arsenic out of his mouth. Inside was skirt of beef, chopped not minced, with potato, swede and onion, all raw, sealed in and cooked together so the beef fat ran through the vegetables and the juice stayed in the case. No gravy, because gravy leaks. A good one had the initials of the man it belonged to cut into the corner so the right pasty got to the right miner. Some had meat at one end and jam at the other, and you knew which end from the mark. It fed Cornwall's miners for two centuries, and when the mines died the miners took it to Mexico, to Michigan, to South Australia, and there are pasty shops in all three to this day with Cornish names over the door. The thing about it is how much of the animal was in it. Skirt is the diaphragm, a cut the supermarket will not stock, cheap, hard-working, full of flavour and fat, and the whole dinner was built round it. The vegetables were there to stretch the beef and soak up what it gave off. Since 2011 the name has been protected by law, which means the pasty in the motorway services, made with minced beef, a glossy lid and a filling that was cooked before it went in, can only call itself Cornish if it is made in Cornwall, and some of the worst of them are. The miner's dinner was a cut of beef in a pastry handle. The modern one is a pastry handle looking for the beef.