Don't be Nasty

Image blatantly nicked from their website. I’ll take it down if they issue a ‘cease and desist’, or better still, I’ll nip back and shoot my own.

Like you, I worshipped Bourdain. But for me, it was beyond standard creepy fandom. On the two occasions I met him, I felt like a pre-teen at a Harry Styles concert. Maintaining journalistic objectivity wasn’t even a consideration; I was too busy concentrating on bladder control and forming a question that wasn’t prefaced with hand flapping and a shrill, involuntary “Squeeeeeee!”.

But it had nothing to do with cheffery. One of the many things for which I’ll forever revere him was the quote...

“You can call me a bad boy chef all you want. I’m not going to freak out about it. But I’m not that bad; I’m certainly not a boy, and it’s been a long time since I was a chef.”

(Versions vary)

For me, it was maybe half about the writing. More important was the ‘being’. For all the cheffing and all the writing, he got loved most for travelling absurd distances, getting his tiny crew to switch on the gear and just being Bourdain.

That’s what I aspire to. Christ knows, I don’t aspire to ‘be’ him. He was profoundly unhappy. But I would love to be remembered for having been there and eaten.

If you think about it, nobody ever said, “Bourdain’s is the best recipe I know for pâté de campagne” (though that’s objectively true). Nobody who’s read it could consider Kitchen Confidential anything other than a flawed compilation, swiftly lashed up and hurried out, that caught a felicitous wave and rode it. Kitchen Confidential became great as people fell in love with Bourdain.

...But everybody remembers when he ate bún chả, with Obama in Hanoi.

I don’t get that sort of opportunity. I’m not sure anyone’s going to buy my pitch for ‘A Bacon Roll in Cheltenham with Liz Truss’, and frankly, I’m glad. But I do occasionally get to go a long way to eat something particularly good.

You have to imagine driving south from Cambridge. Round the M25, out on the M3 and feeling any connection with civilisation vanishing to a distant point in the rearview mirror. Changing modes with the gears, slickly dropping a cog from the gleaming Ballardesque thrust of the motorway to the dual carriageways of the A30 and then worse. Crushed in the B roads, and slowed like corpuscles in an old man’s veins. The closer you get to the extremities of this sclerotic shithole of a country, the worse the outcomes. 

Heading southwest, you mess with space/time. You slide backward 18 months with every mile. By the time you come down off Bodmin Moor, the roads can’t take anything other than tractors, cardboard caravans and groups of kids on bikes with picnic baskets. Nothing out here was designed for post-‘Famous Five’. 

Bourdain got to quote Conrad and write about going upriver like Capt. Willard in Apocalypse Now. 

I get to quote Enid Blyton and a 6hr drive to St Ives.

Just as the ‘major’ roads get too small to thread through, you’re directed by a nearly hand-written roadsign to a one-horse burb called Hayle, that somehow still has the temerity to have traffic congestion, and as the very last atoms of your will to live are dispersing like vape smoke, the road is suddenly blocked.

It feels like you’ve reached the very end of the civilised world, but there is a building that looks for all the world like it’s been built as a barricade between you and your holiday.

In fact, the road drops a little and turns an incredibly sharp left... but you can’t see that. All you can see is ‘Philp’s Famous Pasties’ and, if you don’t brake hard, you’re going to end up in the bakery.

There is a capacious carpark which, as I pull in at 1230 (God, how well I timed that) is filling with mob-handed bikers, old men in VW microbuses, and local tradesmen, their white vans laden with picks and shovels and implements of destruction.

Philp’s is a family business with a few branches across Cornwall…

Porthleven, Helston, Marazion.

Hayle, Camborne, Praze-an-Beeble.

... and if that doesn’t give you a little Betjeman wood, you’re beyond redemption.

They bake on the premises and have been doing so since the brilliantly named Everett Philp started turning them out in his family grocery shop in the 1950s. Today, his great-grandchildren make the pasties by hand. 

Once you join the substantial but fast-moving queue, you have to choose. Each pasty comes in one of three sizes. The Large One, Standard, and Cocktail. 

In Metric they are 620g, 400g and 200g... but I’m not sure they use that down here. Using standard UK journalistic measurements, The Large One is as big as Wales. The Standard would, outside of Cornwall, qualify for its own post-code, and the Cocktail just reminds me how brilliantly a pasty would go with a frozen martini and so, therefore, how I’m going to pick up a bag on the way back to 2026.

There are flavour variants about which I Have Opinions, but I shall reserve them for now. The original is ‘steak’, then there’s a steak and cheese, beef mince, a cheese, a chicken and a ‘vegan’. (They weren’t clear if the latter is intended for eating or as a substitute for leather shoes).

I’m not a religious man, but I like to think I am not without a spiritual element and it is this is which soars when I see that the steak/original/standard is offered either with short crust or ... and I cannot stress this strongly enough ... flaky pastry.

This is some God-level pasty appreciation, right here. I’m not sure a pasty purchaser on the English side of the Tamar - who, let’s face it, is probably arguing about its price in a Meal Deal - would know such pastries existed severally, let alone be able to express a preference. 

Obviously, I ordered both. For science.

It appalls me that we consider the pasty, one of those things that’s close to a national dish, a food fit only to be served out of microwaves in petrol stations.

I’m pretty hot on traditional British artisanal bakery, so let me break it down for you.

As you stand in the queue, you can look through a side door and get an occasional glance at people, some of them older, in white trilbies or hairnets. There are a few of them. It doesn’t take rocket science to tell that this is a labour-intensive, hand-done operation. 

(Lets’s leave aside for a second the very fundamental question of how the fuck they’re surviving the prevailing economic shitestorm in the hospitality business.)

There’s flour about the place. That means they take delivery of the fundamental ingredients. 

When you order your pasty, the counter person grabs it in a paper bag from a bakery rack behind her. It hasn’t been reheated. The last human who touched this thing was one of those humans in a hat out back. They made it. They cooked it and you’re going to eat the damn thing, right here, right now. 

When you bite into the pasty, it’s really hot. Seriously. We’re talking third-degree burns if you don’t take things carefully. 

Why? Because a pasty is a unique thing. The ingredients go in raw. Meat, potatoes, swede, onions, and seasonings. They are sealed in a structurally substantial pastry. Damn right. Don’t believe that ‘handles for tin-miners’ bollocks. That crust is double-twisted so no steam escapes. 

Now let’s bite in and look at the ingredients. There’s a mass of potato and swede, some shredded quite finely so they collapse, some in bigger chunks that will survive the cooking.

My bet is that they lay out the pastry on the bench, cut the circle and then put down a thick layer of the raw roots. The meat... the ‘steak’... is what looks like a couple of pieces... each about the size and shape of half a Mars bar... of a strongly flavoured, loose-fibred, highly-marbled beef. Not an expensive cut, but lovingly chosen. They go through enough. Christ, I bet their butcher loves them. I’d bet a few quid it’s good skirt. Full of flavour and fast to cook.

Then there’s the seasoning. I’m estimating an absolute metric shedload of pepper, sufficient salt and maybe a faint scrape of mace (signifier for traditional English butcher’s pies).

OK. Lay the meat on the veg, close the thing up and put it in the oven.

Now, just consider what’s happening in there. The crust sears on the outside as it goes into the steam-assisted oven. In seconds it’s airtight like the crust of a loaf that then balloons with the pressure of the steam inside. 

I’m still working on a proof for this, but I’m going out on a limb to say that there’s even a degree of pressure cooking going on in there. Not a lot, but a cheap ‘Instant Pot’ operates at 0.7 to 0.75 bar (10 to 11 psi) which raises the boiling temperature inside to maybe 115ºC. Even a modest pressure effect makes a tremendous difference when rendering ingredients down.

Inside our pasty, the veg is pumping out steam as it cooks and the fat in the meat renders. That coarse structure means the meat breaks down fast... not to rags but to barely-credible softness like a long-and-low Southern BBQ, a French Provincial braise, or an authentic Biryani. The fats it yields are melded into the root veg... the inside of the pastry... the smaller pieces breaking down to form a moist, binding material that’s not quite a gravy.

Yeah.

It’s that good. Only better.

I ate it on a bench overlooking the estuary. Sat next to two bikers bemoaning their daughters spoiling their bodies with tattoos and a couple in his’n’hers mobility scooters talking about their ‘wealth portfolio’.

It was the finest thing I’d eaten in a year.

What really boils my urine is that in France, Italy, Spain, or any other great food nation, if they were turning out a product this unique, this respectful of history and culture. If they were making it with such love … such stunning authenticity. They’d close down the town twice a year and have festivals. They’d have the sapeurs pompier organise fireworks and long tables in the town square. There would be dancing, music, long speeches. And middle-class Brits would visit and never ever stop banging on to their friends about the divine asparagus festival they have in this tiny village in the Dordogne or the wonderfully quirky whelk-fair that always coincides with their month in their place in Provence.

Well, I’m filling up the boot on the way back and, if they ever shut the town down for three days, I’ll be dancing in the streets of Hayle.