Food You Can Eat: Crab Pasties

I doubt many of you will give this a try but I did. Why? Because I love pasties and though I’m not English (except by descent centuries ago on both sides) I’ve been enough times, have enough English friends and have been in enough English restaurants and home kitchens that this recipe feels oddly familiar to me. Again, I’m not English, and certainly not Cornish, which is where pasties come from.

A pasty is a beloved British food, like an unsauced hand-held (sometimes) calzone. It is pronounced PASS-tee. A PAY-stee is worn by female burlesque performers and is something quite different. Pasties can have all kinds of savory fillings, meat options are really popular, but whenever I see one that features cheese as a main ingredient I go for that. They’re best enjoyed served up hot in a pub called something like “The Harp & Cow,” inevitably now owned by Wetherspoons. You might also find yourself in a train station and if the options extend beyond a Caffè Nero you’ll probably find a Greggs, which is like the McDonald’s of the British chain bakery scene, and they have pasties. Actually, what am I saying? You’re more likely to find a Greggs in the UK than you are a Union Jack flying somewhere. There isn’t one yet inside the Stonehenge stone circle, that’s only a matter of time, but there is one in Amesbury, just a couple of miles (a trio of kilometres) away.

Speaking of the metric system, I know quite a few of you are fluent in it, I’m going to present this recipe as is, with my notes as a translation. Britain and America, two nations divided by a common language, as someone once said. George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Winston Churchill, my fictional sister-in-law Edith Crawley, now Pelham and the Marchioness of Hexham, in her Publisher’s Note in The Sketch, who knows?

Note: for two hungry adult humans halve this recipe if you’re serving with salad or something else somewhat substantial, and do not attempt to give any of this to a slavering Faithful Hound who might be standing by. Oddly enough, the recipe tells you to make all eight of them, and then freeze half, but they’re not that difficult to make. 

Crab Pasties

Ingredients

Pinch of saffron

2 tbsp olive oil

Knob of butter [This is one of my favorite British cooking terms and it comes up ALL THE TIME, even today. It means you eyeball the butter and take out the amount equivalent to the size of a knob on one of your kitchen drawers, so 1 1/2 or 2 tbsp, or about 1/4 of a stick of butter, for we plebs who don’t send Daisy down to the local dairy to bring back a tub for perennially exasperated Mrs. Patmore]

5 small shallots, finely diced

250g leeks (about 3-4), thinly sliced [I kilogram is 1000 grams, hence the name, and that’s good for 2.2 pounds. So what I learned really early on was when I was confronted with a butcher or a cheesemonger over in the Bundesrepublik you just halve everything. You want a half a pound of Pfefferwurst? Don’t go for half a kilo, that’s too much, go for 1/4 kilo, 250 grams.]

Grated zest and juice of 2 lemons, plus extra wedges to serve

150g full-fat crème fraîche [This is an odd amount. Five or six ounces, depending on how creamy you want your filling to be.]

600g cooked white crabmeat [Canned crabmeat in America is cooked. This is the equivalent to a 22 oz. can, slightly more.]

90g white breadcrumbs [Oh fer Chrissakes, this is 3/4 cup]

Bunch of fresh chives, snipped [Just like Prince Hazza, as he revealed in his remarkably…now is not the time to do a book review of Spare. Actually it’s never the right time to do a book review of Spare.] 

1kg shortcrust or puff pastry [A little over two lbs. As luck would have it, Pillsbury™ sells puff pastry in 17.3 oz. packages, and two of those equal 34.6 oz., which is just shy of 1 kg. I think it is telling that Pillsbury does not sell its puff pastry in 16-oz. increments and I suspect foreign collusion.]

1 medium free-range egg, lightly whisked [Yes, free-range, ideally, but if you think “Bidenflation” is bad here when it comes to egg prices, over in Britain the avian flu struck so badly that people lined up (sorry, “queued,”) for hours to get their hands on any kind of eggs. Eggs were recently what toilet paper and Handi-Wipes were to America in 2020. For a little while, at least, and then the madness cooled, as it normally does, unless you have a Marjorie Taylor (ex-)Greene (div. 2022) yard sign on your front lawn.]

Method

Add the saffron to a bowl with 1 tbsp boiling water. 

Preheat the oven to 200°C/fan180°C/gas 6. [This is my favorite aspect about British cooking! 200°C is 400°F. So is “gas 6,” which is a setting on British “cookers.” Still sold to this day and not something Monty Python made up for those sketches when the beleaguered housewife was awaiting the arrival of her new “gas cooker.” “Fan” means it’s a convection oven, so if you’re attempting this yourself with a convection oven this means 350°F.]

Gently heat the oil and butter in a frying pan. Add the shallots and leeks and cook for 4-5 minutes until soft. Tip into a large bowl. Add the lemon zest and juice and set aside to cool. Stir the cooled saffron water into the crème fraîche.

Add the crabmeat, breadcrumbs, chives and saffron cream to the large bowl. Season.

Roll out the pastry to 3mm thick [about 1/10th of an inch, and this is where older, vaguer recipes were superior to this: “until very thin”] and cut out 8 x 18cm [8 cm translates approximately to pi, oddly enough, 3.14 inches, and 18 cm is 7 inches] circles (re-rolling if needed). 

Divide the mix between them, leaving a 1cm [a little less than half an inch] edge brushed with egg. Crimp together each pasty, then brush with the rest of the egg.

Bake 4 pasties on a tray lined with baking paper for 20-30 minutes until golden. Serve warm with a green salad and lemon wedges.

Open-freeze the other 4 pasties, then put in a freezer bag. Freeze for up to 3 months. Cook from frozen at 200°C/fan180°C/gas 6 for 40 minutes. [This I cannot explain. I don’t know what “open freeze” is and I don’t know why you wouldn’t serve and consume all eight pasties at once, especially since crabmeat is involved, and frozen/reheated crabmeat is…not optimal.]