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Papua New GuineaFlavors · Michigan
Large baked pastry shaped like a half-moon, filled with meat, potato, rutabaga, and onion. It arrived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with miners from Cornwall in the 19th century.
Traditional dish from Michigan
Also known as: pasty do Michigan, Cornish pasty
Illustrative images. The pictures in this guide are illustrations based on the real place, not photographs, and may differ from it.
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Pasty — Michigan, the United States
The pasty came from Cornwall, in southwest England, with the miners who arrived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula from the 1840s to work in the copper and iron mines. It was the ideal lunch for someone who spent the day underground: a large, sealed pastry you could carry in your pocket and eat with your hands.
Finnish, Italian, and other immigrants who worked in the same mines adopted the pasty, and it stopped being the food of a single group and became the food of the whole region. The traditional filling is diced beef, potato, rutabaga, and onion, raw, which cook inside the pastry in the oven.
With the opening of the Mackinac Bridge in 1957, tourists began crossing to the Upper Peninsula, and pasty shops multiplied along the roads.
Dough made of flour and fat; filling of diced beef, potato, rutabaga, and onion; sometimes carrot.
Hot, eaten with the hands or with fork and knife; some people eat it with gravy or ketchup.
Year‑round.
Your questions
It is a large baked pastry filled with meat, potato, rutabaga, and onion, traditional to the Upper Peninsula.
With miners from Cornwall, England, who came to work in the copper and iron mines of the Upper Peninsula from the 1840s.
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