The life of pie

Cornish pasties as a chic meal in swinging Chelsea? Kevin Braddock meets three surfer dudes who have taken a humble snack and turned it into an upper-crust treat

Half of London's smart set may have decamped to Cornwall to surf, breed and renovate property, but the West Country county is doing its own bit of colonising. You notice it first by the aroma: a robust scent of baking pastry, spuds, meat and turnip that comes only from a freshly baked Cornish pasty. It's the smell of the West Cornwall Pasty Company, and it now makes taste buds tingle in high streets, arcades and station concourses dotted around the country.

Half of London's smart set may have decamped to Cornwall to surf, breed and renovate property, but the West Country county is doing its own bit of colonising. You notice it first by the aroma: a robust scent of baking pastry, spuds, meat and turnip that comes only from a freshly baked Cornish pasty. It's the smell of the West Cornwall Pasty Company, and it now makes taste buds tingle in high streets, arcades and station concourses dotted around the country.

In just six years, Gavin and Arron Cocking's West Cornwall Pasty Company has developed from a single shop opened in Reading with a £2,000 overdraft, a spark of can-do entrepreneurialism and a lot of elbow grease, to an operation that shifts 5 million pasties a year across 30 sites and generates an annual turnover of £14m. Remarketing a dormant curio of British cuisine, the company has successfully tapped into our appetite for authentic gastronomic experiences in a lunchtime takeaway market that had barely progressed since Pret A Manger re-imagined the sandwich back in 1986.

Unlike the grey, unidentifiable packages of formless pastry served in chip shops, or the pre-cooked, microwavable Ginsters sold in service stations, West Cornwall's fare is painstakingly true to the original Cornish blueprint - a simple, filling and nutritionally complete meal, baked in a shape to fit Cornish tin-miners' pockets. Made in a bakery in Falmouth, the fresh pasties are cooked on site. And it's not only the traditional Cornish recipe - diced steak, potato, onion and turnip wrapped in a rough pastry parcel - that punters are feasting on. There are now 15 varieties including such previously unheard of combinations as chicken and balti, turkey and cranberry, and cheese and cauliflower.

While the pasties are taking on different forms, each of the chain's premises still warmly evokes the ruddy seaside charm of the Cocking brother's home county. Menus are painted on surfboards hung from the ceiling; walls are decorated with vistas of sandcastles and fishing boats and tables are covered with gingham cloths - emotional signifiers that find resonance with so many of us. Sat amid the tables of their King's Road branch in London's Chelsea, 38-year-old Arron explains the draw. "Pasties look appealing, they give off a great smell and even if people have no association with Cornwall, they see it as something with some history to it."

The Cockings' own story is a satisfying as their pasties. Natives of Helston on the Lizard Peninsula, Arron and Gavin, 37, returned in their mid-twenties from travelling and rekindled an old idea of bringing the authentic pasty, which they'd grown up on, to the high street. Their first outlet was an instant success. "We'd never done anything like it," Gavin recalls. "We had no DIY or shopfitting experience - I'd never picked up a hammer in my life. We taught ourselves." Within a year they'd opened five more shops, each time moving from site to site, living in the basement of each, subsisting on pasties while their girlfriends, sisters Victoria and Sarah Barber, ran the ovens and designed the shops. An old schoolfriend, Mark Christophers, quit his City job to manage the company's financial expansion.

"We've grown up on pasties, so we came up with a product like the one you'd get in Cornwall - we're convinced you'd be hard-pushed to get a better pasty in Cornwall than you can in our shops. We wanted to do a pasty we could be proud of because we have a lot of friends who come up from Cornwall and want to try it."

"But it's only a good product if it's done well," adds Mark. "It's a shame that so many places make pasties so poorly, that's done an awful lot to undermine their reputation."

It only adds to the authenticity of the experience that the company's directors are peroxide-haired, thoroughbred Cornishmen whose knockabout cheer reflects the wholesome unfussiness of their product. The Cocking brothers have managed to bake a part of their own heritage into the core of their business. It's a similar strategy to brands such as Ben & Jerry's ice-cream or Innocent Smoothies. Both have enjoyed rampant success by building local history, authenticity and fun into original food products, all of which suggests West Cornwall Company's plans to open even more stores around the country will be hungrily received.

"When we first opened, people found it quirky," Gavin says. "We all had really long hair and, at lunchtimes, the shop would be full of people in suits. It was fun, people liked coming in for the atmosphere." Consumers as far away as Glasgow are now enjoying their pasties and there's talk of opening a further eight takeaways this year and then possibly hitting New York.

Not that they're in any hurry. "I remember when we first sold a million pasties a year," says Arron, "it was unbelievable. Only a couple of years ago we were still shopfitting. We feel we're ticking along quite nicely."

For further information and details of stores, visit www.westcornwallpasty.co.uk or call 01326 561 110

We'll eat again? Five foods ripe for reappraisal

Faggots in bread

A delicacy of West Midlands cuisine, clearly overdue for a relaunch. A filling of "lights" - chopped liver and kidneys - is accompanied by boiled peas and served between slices of white bread.

Barm cakes

Underappreciated Lancastrian speciality (outside Lancashire that is), these "advanced bread rolls" are baked with heavier dough than standard rolls and boast a tougher top crust. The traditional accompaniment is chipped potatoes; flat cap and whippet optional.

Jamaican beef patty

Usually sat forlornly sweating inside the chippie's display cabinet, the Jamaican patty is a small pastry stuffed with a spicy ground-beef mix. Scotch bonnet mushroom give the patty is piquancy, while paprika accounts for its sunny colouring.

Sweet Yorkshire pudding

The true Yorkshireman scorns the assumption that Yorkshire pudding is solely the accompaniment to roasts, and liberally slathers jam all over a slice or three for his dessert. With clever marketing the sweet Yorkshire pudding has the potential to be the new banoffee pie.

Welsh cakes

Heavy, scone-like pastries cooked on a griddle and pebbledashed with currants and other dried fruit, this Welsh treat could render the Danish pastry era over for good.