The far west of Cornwall is steeped in sea myths. The ancient village of Mousehole is home to some very unusual foodie folklore. Local legend has it that a terrible set of storms in a winter in the 16th century gave rise to a particularly peculiar British pie recipe, stargazey pie, cooked and eaten in this village for centuries. But it seems its origins are a little fishy.
The name of this attractive little fishing village near Penzance is pronounced “Mowzel”. Mousehole has been called one of the prettiest villages in Cornwall, and with good reason. It is a maze of narrow, winding streets lined by cottages built of local dark grey stone. Within the harbour are two small beaches. In the churchyard at nearby Paul is the grave of Dolly Pentreath, a native of Mousehole and reputedly the last living person to speak Cornish as her native language (see video below for a sample of this lovely language that is making a comeback). Outside the almost circular harbour is St Clement’s Isle, once home to a religious hermit. Along the coast is a huge cave, said to be the source of the village’s unusual name. The village is nowadays very popular with tourists, who flock there in the summer months.
Mousehole way back in the 16th century would have been completely different to the Mousehole that you see today. The harbour would have been completely full of fishing boats. It was a true fishing village, where the entire population depended on the sea. The most abundant fish were pilchards, now more commonly called sardines, and the whole village would help to process them in summer and autumn.
But in the depths of winter, fishing was a perilous business, and that’s when it is thought the 16th century story begins, with the exploits of a fisherman called Tom Bawcock. The myth told by Mousehole locals is that there was a strong southerly gale blowing, with the waves crashing up over the harbour wall. It was very difficult for anybody to get out of the harbour to fish and the village was starving. Despite this terrible weather, Tom Bawcock took his little boat out to sea and came back with seven sorts of fish. He landed this saving harvest and the villagers turned it into a large pie, filled with the fish he caught, egg and potatoes and topped with a pastry lid. And through the pastry lid the heads of the sardines could be seen, looking up towards the stars. Stargazey pie was born and the village was saved from starvation.
That is the legend. But what do we actually know about this peculiar pie? It seems, not a lot. We know that there are lots of different names for it. Stargazey, stargazing, starry gazy, but it’s not until we get to the start of the 20th century that we start to see recipes for it. The first printed reference to the pie can be found in a dictionary printed in 1847, J. O. Halliwell’s ‘Dictionary of Archaic & Provincial Words‘, in which it is asserted that starry gazey pie is actually a term from the 13th Century. So, well before Tom Bawcock’s time.
“A pie made of pilchards and leaks. The heads of the pilchards appearing through the crust as if they were studying the stars.” Sounds familiar.
The next issue that questions the real origins of the pie and its roots in Mousehole is there doesn’t seem to be any definitive evidence of a Tom Bawcock ever living in the area. Historians have searched all the local records and it is difficult to pinpoint an actual man who would have been the centre of this myth. Presumably, it kind of reflects a wider idea of what a fisherman’s life is and the kind of risks that you have to take when you brave such rough seas.
These kinds of calculations were everyday heroic acts. So when we talk about Tom Bawcock, he might just be a sort of an “everyman”, a sort of useful figure to attach a story to, but it seems he never actually existed as an individual. The myth is encapsulating the whole way of life of these little Cornish fishing villages, where people were genuinely, economically and physically dependent upon a very unpredictable crop from the wild sea.
The Stargazy story is still celebrated every year on the 23rd of December at the only pub in Mousehole, The Ship Inn, where Starry Gazy pie appears on the menu only once a year. Locals gather to get a taste of history and to toast their brave fishermen and ancestors on what has become known as Tom Bawcock’s Eve. The village Christmas illuminations are also switched on on this day but for locals, the celebration of Stargazy seems to eclipse the Christmas festivities.
If you would like to try the recipe, click here: https://www.swanandlion.com/stargazey-recipe-english
The Cornish Language:
A storm at Mousehole: