
The Cornish pasty descends from a broader family of medieval English meat pies. The earliest literary reference to pasties is likely from Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” Legal records from 1200´s Norwich describe pastry makers accused of reheating three-day-old pasties for sale as fresh. In London, a 1350 regulation barred cooks, on pain of imprisonment, from charging more than a penny for putting a rabbit in a pasty. These pasties and the alleged venison pasty 1660´s London diarist Samuel Pepys suspected was beef were little more than cuts of meat wrapped in pastry dough. By then the Cornish pasty made from chipped beef, potatoes, swedes (rutabagas) and onions had already taken its place in Cornwall’s regional cuisine.
Tin had been gathered in Cornwall, first from rivers and then from ever deeper pits and shafts, since prehistoric times. In ancient Europe, Cornish tin was likely traded via intermediaries with the Phoenicians, who controlled the Mediterranean metal trade. Mining continued throughout the Roman and medieval eras and into the early modern period. For Cornish men and boys heading underground, the pasty amounted to a highly efficient food: self-contained, self-insulated and packed with calories.

The traditional recipe for the pasty filling is beef with potato, onion and swede, which when cooked together forms a rich gravy, all sealed in its own packet! As meat was much more expensive in the 1600s and 1700s, its presence was scarce and so pasties traditionally contained much more vegetables than today. The presence of a carrot in a pasty, although common now, was originally the mark of an inferior pasty.
Ideas for the filling are endless and can be made to suit individual tastes. There is much debate as to whether the ingredients should be mixed before they are put in the pasty or lined up on the pastry in a certain order, with pastry partitions. However, there is agreement that the meat should be chopped, not necessarily minced, the vegetables sliced and none should be cooked before they are sealed within the pastry. It is this that makes the Cornish pasty different from other similar foods.

It was common for the pasties to provide a hearty, savoury main course lunch and a sweet or fruity dessert course. The savoury filling would be cooked at one end of the crescent and the sweet course at the other end. Hopefully, these ends would be marked on the outside.

Although many national businesses now trade in Cornish pasties, any local would tell you that none compare to traditional home-baked pasties.
Superstition
There are superstitions and beliefs surrounding the humble pasty that has been passed on through the ages and accepted as a ritual. Firstly, it was said that the Devil would never cross the River Tamar into Cornwall for fear of becoming a filling of a Cornish pasty after hearing of the Cornish women’s inclination to turn anything into a tasty filling!
The next relates to the crusts of the pasty. A Cornish wife would mark her husband’s pasty with his initials so that if he saved some of his pasty for an afternoon break, he could distinguish his from his colleagues. It was also so that the miner could leave part of his pasty and the crust to the “Knockers”. The Knockers are mischievous “little people”, or sprites, who live in the mines and are believed to cause havoc and misfortune unless they are bribed with small amounts of food. The initials carved into the pasties, it is assumed, made sure that those miners who left their crusts for the “Knockers” could be determined from those who did not.

They may not have wanted another trade to use the idea but when migrants from the Cornish tin mining community moved into other counties of England and across to America, in search of work, they took with them their pastry crescent filled with a hearty meal.
America
The Cornish pasty arrived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (U.P.) in the 1840s, just a few years after Michigan’s present-day boundaries were carved out of the former Northwest Territory. Adventurers crossed the Straits of Mackinac to the isolated U.P. to prospect for minerals, discovering significant iron and copper deposits beneath the northern forests. Experienced miners from Cornwall immigrated to help develop the mines, bringing pasty-making with them. Although Cornish migration was soon supplanted by much larger waves of Finns and Italians, the pasty took hold as a traditional miners’ food.
In their seminal study of the Cornish pasty in Northern Michigan, folklorists William and Yvonne Lockwood describe how the pasty was adopted by Finnish and Italian miners, who looked to their Cornish supervisors for cues on how to behave in American culture. By the mid-1900s, the pasty was so firmly entrenched among all the Upper Peninsula’s ethnic groups that it was common to find locals who assumed that the pasty was of Finnish or even Italian origin. Each culture had its take on the traditional recipe, with the Finns often controversially substituting carrots for the traditional rutabaga. Other locals emphasized the pasty’s true origins, referring to the dish as the “Cousin Jack mouth organ”—that is, a Cornishman’s harmonica.
After the 1957 Mackinac Bridge opened the Upper Peninsula for tourism from southern Michigan, the pasty shifted from being a food mainly cooked at home by U.P. locals who were known as “Yoopers”, to one sold at restaurants to visitors from southern Michigan and beyond, playfully derided as “Fudgies” for their preferred dessert. In a moment of Yooper-Fudgie unity, Gov. George Romney declared May 24, 1968, to be the first statewide Michigan Pasty Day.