This month, How to Eat is chomping on a pasty. Can this ever be a sit-down meal? Is it acceptable to eat a pasty on the bus? And is how a pasty pairs with pickled red cabbage the ultimate taste test?

From (presumed) grumbling in 13th-century Great Yarmouth about having to give the king 24 herring pasties each year to the disbelief last summer (“Why in the name of Satan does our county need a Greggs?”) at the news the high-street bakers had opened its first Cornish outlet, pasties have always provoked passionate feeling. In many ways this is a savoury snack dogged by controversy, in the shape of PR-friendly squabbles about where the pasty was invented – Cornwall? Devon? Cumbria? – or PR disasters such as George Osborne’s 2012 “pasty tax” U-turn. There is even fierce dispute about whether genuine Cornish pasties should be crimped along the top or at the side. For the record, the presumably soon-to-lapse EU protected-geographical-indication status, which Cornish pasties enjoy, insists on a side-crimp.

This is all either proof of how much Britain loves pasties or evidence of a country with too much time on its hands. At this stage, trying to isolate the pasty’s place of origin is pointless. Cornish miners in the 19th century helped popularise them globally, from Pennsylvania to Perth, Australia, but they were being eaten by English nobles centuries earlier. Stuffed with salmon or venison, they took their name from the medieval French for pie (paste) and were seasoned with dried fruit in a similar way to Moroccan pastillas. The pasty’s bloodline is definitely not English and, like the samosa and empanada, probably traces back to the Middle East.

Yet, despite our enormous appetite for pasties (£86m pretax profits at Greggs last year; 120m pasties produced in Cornwall annually), we rarely discuss how best to eat them. How to Eat (HTE) is here to address that oversight. Oggie oggie oggie!

When and where

There is (limited) scope to serve a pasty as a plated meal – see below – but pub lunches aside, this is primarily, by its very design, a portable product intended to be eaten on the go. There is a hardcore of snobs who find the sight of anyone eating in public – on the street, in bus shelters, sat on a wall outside Kwik Fit – grotesque, but, hopefully, they will have already clicked away from this piece to read a more edifying article about fish knives or preferable thread-counts for acceptable table linens. Not only is eating alfresco fine, but, on a cold day, after schlepping around a dreary, windblown UK shopping precinct, getting your mitts on a hot pasty is often the greatest pleasure available.

Fundamentally, this is a 10am to 4pm food product: a carb-forward life-saver for those hungover and struggling into work late; a quick lunch treat; the perfect stop-gap for those still hungry between dinner and tea. There will be some BTL who insist we should make our own but, to derive ultimate enjoyment from it, a pasty should be eaten from a paper bag, giving the shop-bought version a clear edge. The tactile, multi-sensory nature of that experience – piping-hot pasty in a gently rustling bag held firm in two hands, the tentative first bite, its radiating heat, its curlicues of steam in winter – is key to the (spiritually) nourishing comfort it conveys. That paper bag also serves an important function in retaining most of the crumbs. Walking while eating a bagged pasty is, in fact, the best way to ensure you do not end up wearing half of it.

Occasionally, someone will suggest waiting till you get home to eat those pasties. This is a bad idea. Firstly, pasties have an optimum edibility temperature (OET). You should buy them red hot, never lukewarm or cold (cold, most commercial pasties taste like a pocket of wet cardboard filled with under-seasoned slurry). Then, over the next minute or two, you must patiently nibble and blow at the pasty’s edges, to ascertain precisely when it has entered that important, brief OET window – and then pounce.

Leave it until you get home and, invariably, your pasty will be cold. You will attempt to microwave it back to life (a rookie error), and, possibly, suddenly worried about getting crumbs everywhere, someone will hand around plates or, worst of all, cutlery. Once a pasty touches cold porcelain, you might as well bin it. It is the kiss of death. Suddenly this casual snack has taken on a discordant formal edge, one that leaves it, that lone pasty on a large white plate, looking unattractively beige, wan and lonely; bereft almost.

Picnics

Due to their portability, pasties are frequently recommended as a picnic food. This is logistically misguided in several ways (how do you keep them warm?), but most obviously in glossy articles that include recipes for seafood-summer-beach-picnic-pasties. That concept is insane. Beaches are full of sand. Sand gets everywhere. You do not want sand in your pasty. Never, ever eat on the beach.

Public transport

Since every transport terminus in Britain contains multiple pasty outlets, it is important to consider the pasty’s suitability for consumption on public transport.

In its favour, it is quiet and – despite occasional bans on the basis they smell like BO (!) – even the meatiest pasty is one of the less nasally invasive hot foods. Brush any crumbs off the seat as you leave, take that paper bag with you (it cleverly doubles as a napkin for your greasy fingers) and a pasty can be eaten with minimum disruption to your fellow passengers. There is a vocal minority so uptight they cannot abide anyone eating in the same train carriage or bus as them (HTE would like to see the data on the crossover between that group and those who hate people eating in the street), but, frankly, they need to learn to live and let live.

HTE finds the pasty a perfectly acceptable item to eat on public transport.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest If you have to serve a pasty on something, a wooden board is preferred. Photograph: Alamy

The pasty meal

The temptation in pubs and cafes to treat a pasty like a pie, as the centrepiece of a main meal, must be resisted at all costs. Not only are pasties often great filling lumps in themselves (“Cornwall suffers more bad food per square mile than anywhere else in the civilised world,” wrote the then New York Times food critic, William Grimes, in 1999, before comparing Cornish pasties to doorstops), but also, unlike pies, they do not contain much liquid.

The pie is self-saucing, it brings the gravy, it delivers the necessary level of lubrication to the plate. Pasties are far drier and, moreover, do not react well when gravy is added around them. They and their pastries (coated, egg-washed shortcrust, super-absorbent flaky or puff) are not designed to be moistened by external agents and can easily become grainy or waterlogged when surrounded by a moat of gravy.

Put that hunk of pastry on a plate with chips, new potatoes, mash, peas or baked beans and you create a very dry mound of unevenly carb-heavy food. Instead, pasties should be served hot on a wooden board (that will better retain their heat), or at least on a warmed plate and with no more than one item from a short list of acceptable ancillary accompaniments. That may be a simple sauce or chutney (ketchup, brown sauce, mustard, piccalilli), a pot of mushy peas or some pickled red cabbage. None of which require cutlery – at most you might want a fork.

Do not use coleslaw, it is too greasy. And no side salad either, whether an Ottolenghi-extravaganza or a limp, undressed tangle of leaves, typical of British garden centre cafes. Serving a pasty with salad is to throw two separate dishes together on the same plate – one cold, one hot (rarely a good idea) – in a kind of wilful denial of reality. It is magical thinking to imagine these will, somehow, coalesce into a complementary whole.

The pasty barm

A Greater Manchester (Wigan-Bolton axis) cousin of the pie barm, the pasty barm is a young person’s game. Once you reach your later years, ravaged by decades of eating industrially processed foods, even the thought of one will have you scrambling for the Zantac.

A note on fillings

Despite an historical precedent for such, fish and seafood pasties (particularly if wrapped in texturally discordant shortcrust, rather than puff) are a bizarre idea. Fish and pastry are not natural bedfellows. Similarly, given the myriad potential ways you can render combinations of fruit, cream, custard and chocolate in desserts, the idea of encasing them entirely in pastry, in a pasty, is strange. Has anyone ever eaten dessert and thought: “Mmm … that was OK, but what it really needed was more pastry”? No.

Indeed, there is a strong argument, re: pasty fillings, that if you cannot successfully pair them with the tangy sharpness of pickled red cabbage, they do not work. HTE says yes, for instance, to the classic Cornish beef; lamb and vegetable; cheese and onion; cheese and potato; some sort of sausage and onion combo; possibly curried potato pasty. But a firm no to the red cabbage-resistant creamed chicken pasty; ham, pea and ricotta; chicken and chorizo; and those bizarre hybrids where a full English or a Thai green curry is stuffed into a pasty – not because it improves either, but just because it is physically possible.

Equipment

Outdoors: paper bag. Indoors: wooden board (plate at a push), fork optional.

Drink

Fizzy pop is the fallback when out and about (Diet Coke is a good all-rounder). But a strong brew or a pint of zesty cask ale will work, too. Fundamentally, this is less about careful flavour pairing than settling on a drink you can comfortably gulp, to repeatedly sluice down and clean your palate of pasty debris.

So, pasties, how do you eat yours?