PASTRY. 555 
in the need by the miners of a portable food which they might 
carry with them to the mines for their dinner, and might eat 
without suffering harm by handling it with coppery fingers. 
Hence arose the Miner’s Pasty, which is commonly slipped by 
them into a small cotton bag with a string run into the top, so 
that the contents may be eaten from out the'bag, to be held in 
the miner’s hand, and turned back as the Pasty diminishes. 
A Rhubarb pie is improved by sprinkling lemon-juice over it 
when eaten. A beef-steak pudding is to be preferred before a 
beef-steak pie (which often engenders harmiul gaseous products 
within it), A mutton-chop pudding, with oysters therein, is 
excellent. 
The Pie, both in its name, and in its nature, is peculiarly 
national to England, and interwoven with the history of our 
country’s culture. 
** No soil upon earth is so dear to our eyes 
As the mud we first stirred in terrestrial pies ; 
And what are the prizes we perish to win : 
To the first little minnow we caught with a pin?” 
Pepys tells of going (January 6th, 1661) to dinner to Sir Wm. 
Penn’s (his wedding day), “ where we had, besides a good chine 
of beef, and other good cheer, eighteen Mince-pies in a dish,— 
the number of years that he hath been married.” ‘“* Mincing 
of meat in pies,” quoth Bacon, “saveth the grinding of the 
teeth.” The Christmas pie of the Restoration Period (seven- 
teenth century) was a noble dish rarely weighing less than 
fourteen pounds, and often exceeding several stones in weight. 
The meat ingredients then represented nine-tenths of this 
minced, or shred pie, with only a flavouring of dried fruits, 
plums, raisins, and citron peel, which were then expensive 
luxuries; but nowadays the meat ingredients have shrunk, 
and shrunk, until only a mere trifle of chopped suet remains as 
a reminder of the solid fare of a robuster age. The Pie is an 
English institution which when once planted on American soil, 
forthwith ran rampant, and burst forth into an untold variety 
of genera, and species. In the City of New York there exists 
a monster pie-baking company, one of the oldest trusts in the 
city ; tens of thousands of pies (as consumed there daily) are 
produced at this particular bakery. Each season has its 
favourite pie, but all the year round Apple pie is well to the fore. 
Hot pie is the proper thing, according to the judgment of the 
