While maybe not everyone knows what a pasty is, most everyone knows how delicious a meat pie is and so it shouldn’t take a lot of convincing to get you to try out a Cornish Pasty. That’s really what they are in essence – a meat pie that’s wrapped up in flaky, buttery crust, making it perfect for a handheld meal on the go.
I happened to grow up in a small Gold Rush mining town where these were very popular, so I’ve been eating them for decades because we had not one, not two, but three local pasty shops. (In fact, my family has a weird tradition of eating them on Christmas Day!) See, Cornish Pasties were made popular all over the world as Cornish miners made their way around the globe, so this delicious little pie is popular in places like Michigan as well as small mining towns in Northern California.
Before we get too far, I’m going to tell you that it’s pronounced pah-stee and not pay-stee, lest you read the rest of this with visions of twirling tassels filling your head.
Now that we have that covered, we can get to a bit more interesting trivia. I have always been told that pasties were popular with miners because it was an easy meal to bring down into the mines, since it was handheld, filling, and delicious. But what’s more than that, originally pasties were often made with savory filling in one half and sweet filling in the other, so you could eat your way through your beef pasty down in the darkness of the mine and finish up with a sweet berry pie filling at the end. I haven’t seen them made that way in the modern-day or made them that way myself – my favorite filling is beef and vegetables, though there are about 101 different ways to go about filling them.
