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The great Scouse pasty war (livpost.co.uk)
56 points by DamonHD 4 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 27 comments
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I’m just going say this, what’s shown in the illustration is clearly NOT a pasty.

Pasties are pretty serious grub.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty


Important not to confuse it with the Pastie, used to cover nipples

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasties


Bizarre, but welcome, to see this article wholly unrelated to hackerdom on the front page.

My take is that Sayers quality just wasn’t good enough and still isn’t, and that all the buyouts gutted the heart out of the business.

As a scouser I choose Greggs over Sayers any day.


> My take is that Sayers quality just wasn’t good enough

If I'm thinking quality, Greggs isn't my first suggestion...


Whyyy haven't sausage rolls taken off in the US?

Traveling to the UK and Australia, I love them. So satisfying.

Why do we get stuck with... gas station hotdogs instead?

I genuinely don't get it.


If you start a business do pork pies too.

And Scotch eggs

And Jellied eel, why not?

Pork pies and scotch eggs are widely-available savoury snacks in the UK, but jellied eels are not?

I want to make clear to the US folks here that there's about 2 or 3 cafes that still sell traditional eels, and it's explicitly a London food, not wider British cuisine. From the number of videos and articles I see about them though, you'd think the country was covered in Eel cafés. Honestly, covering them at all is tabloid ragebait content at this point.

Correct.

Pork pies even have a protected geographic designation now:

https://www.mmppa.co.uk/

Scotch eggs are a common, if old fashioned, pub snack and are sold in supermarkets.

Jellied eels are a London thing, mainly poor areas of central East London, and very very rare even there now.


Had to look up what was in the article and it's more like something you'd find at a donut shop in the US, but not quite the same. Things like the klobasnek/kolache are popular here in Texas.

Cannot make the DFW<->AUS run without a Czech Stop

I've never been to Texas in my life, but I did live in Czechia for 9 years and my wife is Czech.

A Czech koláč is always sweet, with no exceptions. I Googled the foods you and the previous comment mention, and I've never seen anything like them. The Czechs do sometimes bake bread rolls with a sausage inside, though – they are very big on sausages – and they're sold cold in supermarkets and bakeries as a savoury snack. I think they're called variants on "bread roll with sausage", though, and I don't think I've ever heard them called "klobasnek" or "klobasnik".

Saying that, now we live in the British Isles, my wife has developed a fondness for sausage rolls. Including Gregg's ones when we visit the UK. :-)


Texas Czech and actual Czech have about 150 years of divergent evolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klob%C3%A1sn%C3%ADk

It's very much a Texas thing.


>I've never been to Texas in my life...and I've never seen anything like them

"For decades, Czech Stop has been known far and wide for its world-famous Texas kolaches"[0]

You clearly missed the "Texas kolaches" in your searching. Using "Texas" as a qualifier does big things. Texas BBQ or Texas chili is not the same thing as BBQ or chili from other places. Texas kolaches are not the same thing as Czech koláč, nor never claimed to be. At best, inspired by from Czech babis passing down and tweaking recipes since the 1800s

[0]https://www.czechstop.net/


> You clearly missed the "Texas kolaches"

Why would you even think that, let alone say it?

I didn't miss it. I wasn't talking about Texan food. I clearly said, and you quoted that I've never been to Texas in my life.

I was talking about the original stuff from the old country, that inspired this. Nothing else. I thought it might be a bit of fun, something of interest.

I should have realised that someone misunderstand and insult me. I mean, it's HN. :-(


Not sure where the supposed insult is. If one was read, there was none intended.

Since you're not familiar with Texas folklore, using the word Texas as a qualifier is part of being Texas. "Everything is bigger in Texas" is a common phrase. In golf, there's "Texas rules". In Texas BBQ, it's understood that if there's a fire in the box, there's a beer in the hand.


> I have nothing against Greggs.

I do. This man is benefitting from your custom: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-39443585


I used to love my Sayers sausage roll as a kid. I haven't lived in Liverpool for 25 years now, but sad to hear Sayers is no more.

Obligatory dad joke.

How do you make a sausage roll?

Push it down a hill.


> I haven't lived in Liverpool for 25 years now, but sad to hear Sayers is no more.

Same, except it's just over 50 years for me.

This story was quite a nostalgia trip for me – I immediately remembered trips to Sayers bakeries with my mum when I was little, although as a little lad I was more interested in the cakes than the sausage rolls myself.


Well, not sure if it's classed as a cake, but my favourite desert there was the egg custard tart.

Oh, yes, me too!

Something I really missed in a decade living in Czechia.

It's odd how in other countries it is mostly baked goods that have deep differences and leave whole much-loved categories missing. For me: pasties, mince pies, egg custard tarts, Jamaican-style patties.

The Slavs love this stuff called tvaroh: it's the curds that, given more work and time, can be made into cheese. It's a semisolid sour-tasting milky stuff. They put it in all kinds of foods, especially cakes and pastries. I first tasted it at 46 years old and I hate the stuff. Every visit to a bakery is a lottery: will it be all right, and maybe even good, or will it have tvaroh in it and taste like it was made with extract of very old gym sock?

I taught English for a while and many students wanted to know the English word for Tvaroh as it's not in the dictionary. I told them we don't eat it and so don't have a word for it. It blew their minds.

It is not cottage cheese. It is nothing even vaguely similar to lemon curd. It's sort of similar to cheese curd but you can't buy cheese curd, whereas every supermarket has a dozen types of tvaroh.


Is it a cake? Is a tart a pie? I always went for the little custard tarts too.

Makes me think of the cake vs. biscuit philosophical arguments:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_Cakes#Classification_and...


goddamnit, read for a solid 5 minutes until I realised the rest is paywalled, sigh. No pasty facts isn’t worth another subscription. I have many other interesting things to do

Wasn't paywalled when I posted it a few days ago - would not have posted if it had been!

Annoyingly it's several (phone) screens down, so you get into the article before it cuts you off.



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