As of Wed, 8 Jul 1998     
     Pasties: Fruit filled
     Clotted cream      

     The following has been contributed by Laura Hartronft:  



My Grandmother was born in Chilsworthy, in the Parish of Calstock, Cornwall
in 1876.  She married my Grandfather and immigrated to the States in the
early 1900's.  I had always been told my grandparents were Cornish.  They
didn't talk much about their past lives.  My Grandmother's father was a
miner, and as times got hard she had worked as a domestic in London prior to
marrying my grandfather.  When they immigrated, needless to say, they wanted
to leave the bad times behind.



I visited Great Britain in 1985 and fell in love with Clotted Cream.  When I
came home and told my Dad his response was, "Oh yes, my Mother made that."
They had a dairy farm in Oregon, near Portland.  I can remember my Dad
telling, when I was a little girl, about a special kind of cream Grandma
made and sold.  They always saved a wee bit for Grandpa, but the children
were seldom allowed to have any.  I thought it was cream cheese, probably
because that was the only connection I could make.



Keeping in mind that Dad was 77 at the time and his mother had been gone for
20 years, here is how he told me she made clotted cream.



"She put fresh whole milk in a pottery crock, which she placed on the back
of the wood cooking stove over a banked fire and let it stay over the low
heat for several hours until it was thick." (Not far off from what I read on
your page.)



Since we don't have a ready supply of fresh milk I haven't tried to make it
but eventually I will.  I have asked him several times and he always says
pretty much the same.



In 1995 I brought Dad to England for the first time.  He was 87, and legally
blind (although he retains some peripheral vision).  We spent about a week
in Devon and traveled around Calstock.  We found a record of my
Grandmother's baptism when we did research in Truro. She was baptized at the
Parish church in Calstock.  When we visited there we found that the same
font was still in use today.



I asked Dad about other Cornish dishes such as Pasties.  He said he didn't
remember them.  However, when we got to Cornwall and sampled them, the flood
gates opened and he remembered both meat & potatoe and fruit pasties.  I
guess another part of assuming a new life meant calling them something other
than Pasties.  She called the fruit filled ones tarts.



Since we don't use metric system I'll have to convert many of the recipes.
I doubt that I'll be able to find suet easily but In some of my mothers old
cookbooks it tells how to make it.