Copper Coast Legacy · Cornish Meat Pastry
Moonta Pasty
📷 Closely related photo — Photo: David Johnson / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0
Miners' wives reportedly called 'Oggie, oggie, oggie!' down the mine shafts of Moonta and Burra to send pasties to Cornish workers underground — a call-and-response so tied to the food that 'oggie' is still Cornish slang for pasty.
A thick pastry parcel of diced beef, potato, swede and onion, crimped along one edge into a half-moon shape sturdy enough to survive a drop down a mineshaft. Bakeries in Moonta and Burra on South Australia's Copper Coast, nicknamed 'Little Cornwall,' still turn them out daily alongside saffron cake.
Why it's made this way: Cornish miners arrived in large numbers to work South Australia's copper mines from the early 1860s, and towns like Moonta and Burra kept baking the pasty as a point of Cornish identity long after the mines closed, still celebrated today at the biennial Kernewek Lowender festival.
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