Houghton, Munising, and St. Ignace, Upper Peninsula, Michigan
Imagine having a physically demanding mining job that requires you to work underground for 10+ hours a day. It is not easy for you to leave your work location, so you only make the trip once a day when your shift is over—exerting the effort that you have means that you will work up an enormous appetite. However, it’s very dark, so you can’t see any food you are trying to eat. It is usually cold in many of the mines, so there is a desire to get warm. Additionally, there is no place to wash your hands, so they are likely contaminated with highly poisonous arsenic. What do you do to have a filling meal that meets the demands of your job?
Enter the humble Cornish dish called the pasty (pronounced pass-tee). The dish typically includes meat, potatoes, and other vegetables baked within a pastry covering made from wheat-flour dough. At one end of the pie, the dough is curled, becoming a convenient handle for the miners.
The mixture of proteins and carbohydrates provided the miners with a meal that fueled them throughout the rest of their shifts. Because of the structure of the pasty, the interior remained warm for many hours, providing the miners with some added warmth during the mid-shift. Finally, the miners discarded the curled handle so they would not worry about poisoning themselves.
The pasty has become very popular throughout the Cornish diaspora, and the Upper Peninsula fits within that demographic. Although mining has disappeared, pasties are found throughout the Upper Peninsula. We ordered them from three separate locations, including Houghton (Roy’s Pasties & Bakery), Munising (Miner’s Pasty Kitchen), and St. Ignace (Lehto’s). In all three locations, the food was filling and could easily provide someone with enough starch and protein to sustain them throughout the day. The pasties were always a filling and reasonably priced meal option.
The pasty is high in calories, and most people should not make it a regular meal if they have a sedentary lifestyle. However, for miners in the UP and in many places around the world, pasties provided a filling meal that helped them succeed in their physically demanding profession. The culinary history of our nation is richer thanks to this filling, no-nonsense, practical pastry-stuffed lunch.