Snack Attack:

Pastizzi vs. Tinned Pasties

Colour, texture, taste, appearance, ingredients… where do I begin?

It was recently decreed that a tinned pasty is the same as a pastizz. Just like a candle is the same as the sun, or even a 1,000 watt bulb, and instant coffee is the same as Panama Geisha or Ethiopian Yirgacheffe.

Actually, a tinned pasty and a pastizz are categorically different foods, and definitley not variants of the same thing. Pastizzi are constructed on laminated, hand-worked dough that creates shattering layers through folding, re-folding, and fat distribution. That structure is essential to how they eat, and how they smell, and how they sound. Just for the record, the word pastizz was officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in its January 2026 update. It never was a ‘cheesecake’, anyway. The word was first recorded in English as early as 1910.

A tinned pasty has no lamination in any meaningful sense. Its casing, which does not really deserve to be called pastry, is structural containment, not a crafted architecture.

One is engineered to fracture; the other to survive transport and indefinite storage. This is a difference of design philosophy, not just quality.

Freshness is a by-word, a defining property, where pastizzi are concerned. You buy them, and you eat them standing up, from the bag, in the middle of the street. Or else, you order them with your coffee at the corner café, and eat them at your leisure as you watch the world go by.

Pastizzi are a time-sensitive food. Their ideal eating window is measured in minutes after baking. Room temperature, let alone staleness, are failures. On the other hand, a tinned pasty is defined by shelf stability. Its success is measured in months, or years, or even decades. That alone puts them in different culinary classifications.

Pastizzi are the here and now; ephemeral and immediate. Tinned pasties are the needs-must-when-the-devil-drives of food; preserved, deferred, a last resort.. necessity over preference.  Pastizzi rely on fat that melts explosively in the oven, steaming the layers of pastry apart. This process leaves the pastry dry, but rich. Tinned pasties rely on fat that remains stable at room temperature, and migrates into starches over time, probably emulsifying into the filling.

The mouthfeel isn’t just “different”; it’s governed by entirely different fat physics.

In a pastizz, the filling and pastry remain distinct, be it ricotta, curried mushy peas, spinach and anchovies, or any of the new-fangled stuffings. It is contained, not absorbed, and some leakage is a bonus – acceptable, even desirable.

In a tinned pasty, the filling and casing partially merge, because moisture migration is unavoidable. Homogeneity is a feature, aided by the ‘gravy’, not just a flaw.

One celebrates contrast. The other accommodates compromise.  Pastizzi are intended to be held in one hand, with a beverage or a book in the other, and bitten from multiple angles, according to preference. Tinned pasties are shaped for sitting down and having a go at them with a knife and fork, or even a spoon, if they have turned into gloop and the stuffing has partly emulsified with the casing.  

Sound and fracture are not just the poetic explanations for a pastizz. A fresh, hot, pastizz crackles. You hear it before you smell it before you taste it. That audible fracture is part of the experience.  A tinned pasty makes no sound worth mentioning, except the gasp, and wheeze, and final wet slurp as it leaves the cannister. This almost-silence is not chance; it’s the result of moisture and compression.

Pastizzi are traditional social, habitual, cultural… and delicious, tied to bakeries, not packaging. Tinned pasties are emergency food, lazy food, transport food, storage food, existing for when life does not go as planned. Both are made of pastry and filling, but that’s as far as the similarities go.

Pastizzi are made to be a good moment in time, and tinned pasties contingency plans, made to exist in aeternum.

Of Pasty Pasties…

The tin makes a promise. A woman with good posture and pioneer cheeks smiles from the label, holding out a pasty like a minor miracle. Canned Pasty. Fully Cooked. It says what it is. Or rather, it says what it wants to be. What it is supposed to be. What it is promised to be.

This is where Katie Melua comes in, humming “What It Says on the Tin”, ever so politely. This gentle, affectionate track from her 2007 album Pictures is a love song built entirely around the British idiom “does exactly what it says on the tin” meaning someone is honest, reliable, and exactly who they appear to be.

We desperately want to believe her, because belief is easier than doubt when you’re hungry.

Then the lid comes off. The can births the… thing… slumped and shining, a beige splotch coated in what looks suspiciously like snot. It does not so much fall as arrive, escorted by gravity and a slick of lubricating gloop. The gunk is enthusiastic. It clings. It drips. It has opinions. Calling it gravy feels optimistic; calling it mucus feels accurate. This is food that has spent too long thinking about itself. Perhaps it was trying to disintegrate.

This is where it becomes a metaphor for life, whether we like it or not.

Because life, too, is often sold packaged, sealed, and confident, with typography and heritage colours. Life says: career, relationship, plan. Fully cooked. No further preparation required. And then you open it and something slides out that needs swabbing down, maybe apologising for, definitely baking or even deep-frying.

Life, like this sorry excuse for food, is something you weren’t expecting, something vaguely familiar but wetter, more fragile, much less photogenic.

You forgot to glance at the ingredients list. You wonder what’s inside. Meat? Potato? Regret? The label is irrelevant, now. You’ve opened what may be worse than a can of worms, and so you can’t take the tin to the shop for a refund. The woman on the tin does not look away. She has seen worse. She knows that containment is a temporary state.

Perhaps it will be good. This is the lie we tell ourselves, the hopeful one. Because we are hungry. Perhaps heat will fix it. Perhaps enough time in the oven will thicken the gloop into something respectable. Perhaps the mess is just part of the process, the necessary slime between intention and outcome.

Perhaps life will always be like this; a soft collapse, requiring biting one’s lower lip, paper towels, and resilience. Something you didn’t ask for, that still expects you to make a meal of it.

In the end, you plop it onto a tray. You commit. You put it in the oven and wait. The kitchen smells like wet dough and uncertainty. You are, after all, already here. The tin is empty. The promise has been opened.

The thing on the tray culinary betrayal variety of just what it says on the tin. The glossy, golden, perfectly crisp pastry on the label… and then the reality: a nondescript taupe-ish, gelatinous, semi-circle that slithers out with a noise you can feel in your sinuses.

The pastry on the label was a lie. The gloop, lying by masquerading as something from the gravy boat, was the truth. That is life, sometimes, too.

And maybe that’s the point. Not that it’s horrible, but that it insists on being dealt with. Life doesn’t stay neatly labelled. It slithers. It asks for heat. It asks for patience. It asks you to look at the goo and decide whether you’re still hungry.

It leaves a faint, inescapable tinny, acrid taste in your mouth. Slightly nauseating, faintly philosophical, and stubbornly human. The metallic echo that lingers even after you’ve eaten, and drunk your effervescent Vitamin C, and told yourself it’s fine.

The food, like life, has the flavour of compromise. Of convenience, mistaken for care. Of something that’s been preserved a little too well and now wants credit for surviving. You can season it, you can drown it in heat, but there’s always that background note: iron, memory, the inside of a mouth bitten by accident. Perhaps some gagging thrown into the mix.

And life does that too. No matter how warmly you plate it, there’s often a trace of the container left behind. The job you took, because it was there, and there was nothing better at the time. The relationship that fit on paper, but not in actuality. The version of yourself that was stored for one fine day, which suddenly became the here and now.

You gulp. You swallow. You nod. You say it’s not bad, actually. But the tin has already marked you for a nightmare in between bouts of insomnia.

Which is fine. Most of us are walking around with a little metal in our mouths, pretending it’s seasoning.

You make a resolution to try the chicken-in-a-can, and the Christmas Tinner. Because a whole chicken emerging from a tin is the natural sequel to the pasty; same genre, higher stakes. There is something uniquely unsettling about a bird that has forgotten gravity and learned the shape of its container. Chickens should not be cylindrica. They are not liquid, like cats. This a betrayal of physics and trust.

Christmas Tinner is not food, that’s performance art. Layers of “stuff” compressed into a single festive column like geological time, but ostensibly ‘edible’. Turkey sediment. Sprout strata. A gravy fault line. It’s Christmas reduced to a cross-section; tidings of comfort and joy stacked so tightly there’s no room for air, let alone escape. You don’t eat it; you excavate it with a spoon.

This trilogy of tins forms a theology:

The pasty is daily life: messy, disappointing, still, technically, nourishment.

The whole chicken is ambition: too much, wrong shape, shouldn’t have fit ,but somehow made to. Like four whole mackerels in those narrow red tins.

The Christmas Tinner is ritual: tradition stripped of context, preserved long past its emotional expiry date. Life on a loop. Force of habit.

All of them insist on the same lesson: containment changes things. Not always for the worse… but never without consequence. The tins leave an aftertaste, a regret, a silence where steam should be. Compressed existence.

A chicken should be like life; three dimensional, awkward, knobbly, a bit confrontational. You deal with the innards like an adult. There is no label promising emotional completeness, stuck to the chicken you get from the poultry shop… or to life. There is the need for heat, time, attention, flavour.

Cooking from scratch is a refusal to believe that life comes pre-packaged. It defies the belief that nourishment can be fully outsourced. That flavour survives compression without loss. That life improves when you remove air, context, taste, and choice. You chop onions and they make you cry. Not because they’re tragic, but because they’re honest. The Maillard Reaction changes things in front of you, not secretly, in a factory that smells of sweat.

You start with something recognisable, slightly vulnerable, undeniably real. You transform it, but you don’t maul it out of recognition. erase it. You know what went in. You accept responsibility for what comes out.

I prefer my meals to be recognisable for what they are, just as I want a life without the lingering taste of tin.

I am a square peg. I don’t want to be put in a cylindrical hole.

A Piece of Cake

Mentioning an unspecified ‘her’, Ogden Nash [Primrose Path, 1936], wrote “Her picture’s in the papers now, And life’s a piece of cake.” He chose not to write ‘a piece of pie’ – in any case, for whoever ‘she’ was, ‘the living was easy’. In the same year, British author Evelyn Waugh used it in his novel A Handful Of Dust.

There are still some people, however, who insist that the idiom is connected with slavery in the American southern states, in the 1870s. The owners threw parties during which slaves competed in “cake walks”, dances burlesquing their owners’ flamboyant mannerisms and movements. The prize for the best interpretation would be a cake; an easy thing to acquire. However, there is a snag to this theory –  slavery was abolished in 1865.

Both “cake” and “pie” are used as metaphors for things that can be done ‘with the eyes closed’. It must be pointed out that both are easier to eat, than to make.

In Air Force jargon, a mission that is SEAD/DEAD (Suppression/Destruction of Enemy Air Defences) is a dangerous one, because aircrews in aircraft often called “Wild Weasels”, must actively seek out and destroy adversary air defence systems.

In contrast, “a piece of cake” suggests an uneventful flying mission, with no fatalities.

Another theory has it that cakes were [and still are] given out as prizes at county fairs. Winning one of the contests was easy; as easy as taking home a piece of cake. This came into being well before cakes stared being sold in slices, to avoid waste… and calories.

Some of us will eat cake batter, but not cake. We whip it up, but eat it from a mug, without baking it;  not even bothering to zap it in the microwave. Making batter is much easier and faster  than baking a cake. So, wouldn’t “as easy as a spoonful of batter” be better?

There is ice cream that tastes like cake batter; I don’t like ice-cream, either. In any case, batter tastes better at room temperature. Heat and cold destroy the texture.

In New Zealand and Australia, people might say something is a “breeze” rather than a piece of cake. ‘A walk in the park’, ‘a doddle’, ‘cutting butter with a hot knife’, ‘taking candy from a  baby’, and ‘child’s play’ are clichés with more or less the same meaning.

Herculean tasks, steep learning curves, nailing jelly to a tree, and uphill battles, are definitely not slices of cake.

The Missing Brownie

Prompt: ‘I convinced myself that Mom wouldn’t notice a missing brownie, but that didn’t end well.’

The problem, of course, was that these weren’t brownies at all… not in the dictionary definition sense of the term. They were a set designer’s version of brownies, the sort that looked plump, gooey, and irresistible when the camera’s red light winked on; the sort that could seduce even the most disciplined sweet tooth with their darkly gleaming tops. But beneath the deceptive façade, they were nothing but Frankensteinian concoctions; flour that had never met an oven, except as the ersatz brownest of brown bread, egg-whites whisked into shaving foam for a glossy texture, and crayons melted down into glossy “chocolate”.

Anyone else would have paused, even sniffed cautiously. But I was not anyone – I was me. I was the sort of child who could not be in the same room with an open tin of sweets without grabbing a handful and shaking the tin to make it appear still full. The sort of child who thought she was cleverer than her mother. And so, during the lull between one take and another, I pinched a cube. Surely, I thought, no one would care. One little brownie would not make any difference.

I bit into the luscious-looking brownie.

The first impression was not the melting deliciousness I’d expected, but an assault on my taste-buds. Shaving foam, raw meringue, dyed, gluey flower, and crayon wax do not delectableness make.

I gagged. It would not have attracted attention, had I not coughed a wet, choking sound that ricocheted across the soundstage like a gunshot. Heads turned. The director froze mid-hand-wave. The make-up lady, who had false lashes that trembled like moth wings, and perfectly circular rosy cheek blushes, screamed. So much for my chocolaty illusion.

Mom appeared out of nowhere.

She knew, of course. Mothers always know. They can tell who left one inch of milk in the bottle so they wouldn’t have to rinse it out; they know when someone has not washed her teeth; and they know when a child’s soul is being  gnawed ragged by guilt, and her guts are fit to explode.

She swooped, equal parts Florence Nightingale and Judge Judy, handing me a tissue with one hand, and thumping me on the back with the other, and saying “Spit-it-out-spit-it-out…”.

“Why,” she asked in that tone that could slice platinum, “are you such a naughty girl?”

The smell from the shaving-foam froth at the corner of my lips was making me retch even more. The cameraman smothered a laugh. The props master groaned and muttered something about continuity. The missing square left a gaping wound, like a missing front tooth, in the carefully curated tray of brownies. Continuity is King in television. You cannot pan across a plateful of baked goods in one shot and find them mysteriously depleted in the next.

My mother’s mortification, the director’s irritation, and my stomach’s rebellion converged in a single, memorable lesson: not everything that looks like food, is actually edible.

To this day, the smell of crayons brings on a faint wave of nausea, and I cannot pass the baking aisle without hearing the echo of my mother’s voice: firm, exasperated, yet laced with the tiniest flicker of amusement.