The Cornish Pasty |
The Cornish Pasty & Pastypaedia endeavours to bring only the facts about matters to do with pasties. On this page, we do that but we cannot bring total clarity because the origins of some words are uncertain .....
Three things can be made clear:
the Priddy oggy will be dealt with on the English pasties page because it is a recent invention (1960's) that originated in Priddy, a village in Somerset, UK.
tiddly is naval slang for 'proper', as used in the navy and dockyards, especially Devonport; so tiddly oggy can be translated as being a proper pasty, as in Proper Cornish Pasty.
tiddy is Cornish/Devon vernacular for potato, along with 'taty', 'taties' (pronounced 'tay-tees') and spuds. At the other end of the UK, our Celtic cousins in Scotland use 'tatties' as in 'tatties and neeps' (mashed potato and turnip) as served with e.g. haggis. The Cornish Dialect Dictionary gives tatties, tetties and tates for potatoes.
There is uncertainty as to the derivation of the word oggy and the usage of the term tiddy oggy.
Several web sites that state tiddy oggy is another name for Cornish pasty, and indeed, it is commonly used but we suspect it is used unknowingly as to its original meaning. Cornwall-calling.co.uk mentions on its pastie page that a tiddy oggy was filled only with potato. We have seen this elsewhere, with the description that the tiddy oggy came about when times were hard and people could not afford meat. To call a modern pasty a tiddy oggy is probably a misnomer, unless it contains only potato.
1. One derivation may be from the Cornish language word for pasty:
The Cornish Language Fellowship Online, now cornish-language.org used to give 'hoggan' and 'hogan' as words meaning 'pasty'. Also, Wikipedia - Oggy Oggy Oggy says 'oggie' may derive from 'hoggan' which was Cornish slang for a pasty (NB our underlining of 'may').
2. A related derivation may again be from 'hoggan', but meaning a bag:
Ferguson Plarre Bakehouse, Melbourne, Australia - The Tiddly Oggie says 'oggie' may be derived from 'hoggan' which was the name for a Cornish miner's croust-bag.
Archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com says: "I had a look through Jan Trenoodle's song book of 1846 looking for the words oggie, pasty and hoggan. There I found a couple of mentions of a Hoggan bag, plus a definition in the glossary of a Hoggan bag i.e. Hoggan bag, a miner's bag, wherein he carries his provisions. {Hogan (Cornish) coarse; also, a pork pasty} .
Also ..... there are other mentions of hoggan bags in the archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com link above, including to a Brenda Wootton song: Jan Knuckey and Graacey, on her Breton CD 'La Grande Cornouaillaise' . An extract of the song is given down that page. There is backup comment in an answer to this web page message on another page HERE.
3. A third derivation may be from 'hoggan' meaning a cake .....
Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Volume 14 uses hoggan to mean cake, as in plum hoggan and figgy hoggan. This relates to .....
Cornish Dialect Dictionary - "Bearley Hoggan - A cake of barley meal".
Cornish
Dialect Dictionary also gives tiddy-oggie and tiddley-oggie (NB
its spellings) as: "various uses
i.e. potato pie, pastry, pies etc." NB pastry and not pasty. It also gives
oggie as "pasty (not strictly correct), a pie". In other
words it, again, interprets oggie strictly as NOT meaning pasty.
This echoes the linguistic and translation problems experienced in writing
the French pasties page.
4. A fourth, and purely personal, suggestion, is that oggy could be derived from the pork pasty referred to in Section 2 above, where the word hog, meaning pig, might be involved?
A separate point of interest - OGGY NIGHT - I (see 4th photo down, right-hand side) & OGGY NIGHT - II - found on a web site for expatriate Britons living in Singapore, said to be a Devonport Dockyard custom in inter-dockyard rivalry answer to the Scots excuse for a social occasion on Burns Night.
This information is now expanded on the Oggy Night page of The Cornish Pasty.
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