Jack Rendulich
A Passion for Pasties
Golden pasties from Savories in Duluth, Minnesota, are descendants of the “holdable” meal favored by Cornish miners.
In the Lake Superior region, pasties may surpass casseroles, meatloaf and chicken noodle soup as the ultimate comfort food … and not just because they’re shaped like food pillows.
A pasty – rhymes with nasty not hasty – is a tasty meat pie in a pastry pocket that allows you to hold a warm meal in your hand. Pasties, brought to Michigan’s mines in the 1840s by skilled Cornish miners, were quickly adopted by the Finnish workers who later introduced pasties to Michigan and Minnesota’s ore ranges, where they were embraced by many immigrant groups.
These popular portable pastries could be baked in the morning then carried into the woods by loggers or down into the mines for lunch, where they were eaten cold or placed in a shovel and warmed over the candle in a miner’s hat.
(Looking for recipes? Here are two favorites from folks mentioned in this story.)
Chuck Voelker, Copper Country Reflections Website
A Passion for Pasties
Pasties were probably in the lunch pails of these miners at the Ahmeek, Michigan, mine in the 1940s. The men have carbide lamps, which replaced oil wicks. The beloved meat-and-potato pie is pronounced with a soft “a” – pasty – not the hard “eh” of the costume accessory used by Las Vegas showgirls.
America’s Melting Pot
After the first wave of Cornish miners, unskilled laborers would come for decades from Europe. At the turn of the 20th century, many languages were spoken in Michigan’s Copper Country including Greek, Arabic, Polish, Finnish, Yiddish, French, Norwegian, Swedish, German, Slovenian, Croatian, Italian, Welsh and English in Cornish, Scottish and Irish accents.
Perhaps because they were so practical, pasties were quickly adopted by ethnic groups of the mining region who all left their unique stamp on the food. Made at home, ingredients were cubed and layered, so it was possible to individualize by taste – adding extra rutabagas to the husband’s, while omitting onion from the younger son’s. Pasties were so popular as miners’ midday meals that when wives pricked the pastry to allow steam to escape during baking, they formed initials in the crust for identification. Lest anyone mistakenly eat someone else’s, the crimped corner bearing the owner’s initials was eaten last; and many miners followed the tradition of throwing this last initialed bit of crust onto the ground as an offering to the gremlins of the underground mines. This superstitious practice may have reduced the incidence of unintentional poisoning as some mines had high arsenic concentration, and the bit held longest in the miner’s hand would have been most contaminated.
Konnie LeMay / Lake Superior Magazine
A Passion for Pasties
Monsignor Patrick McDowell, now of Duluth, shows off what was a big fund-raising success at his Minnesota Iron Range parish – a pasty.
Pasty Pastor
Monsignor Patrick McDowell, now of Duluth, Minnesota, carried many a pasty the two summers that he worked in both open and underground mines. As a young seminarian, he’d hoped to spend summers at home in Hibbing, working in his brother’s hamburger shack where his mother baked the pies. But his father said no, that if as a priest he were to ask people for money, then he should work in the mines himself to see how hard money was to earn. In Hibbing’s Hull Rust Mahoning mine (the world’s largest open pit iron ore mine) Patrick did tracking – pulled cable, nailed track and tamped down ties.
In the underground mine at Keewatin, he was a timber man, wedging poles to hold up ceilings in areas where ore was dug.
“I am Irish and French. I ate pasties. Everyone ate pasties – the Yugoslavians, Italians, Finns, Swedes, Slovenians and Croatians,” recalls the 79-year-old. “We kept our food in the dry, which is what we called the lockers where we showered and changed back into clean clothes before going home. Metal lunch pails had a compartment on top large enough to hold your pasty; fruit or sandwiches could fit below, but a pasty is a very filling meal. … I kept quiet at the mines about my education. But when the foreman learned I was becoming a Catholic priest, he shouted for everyone to gather round, then announced, ‘I want no one [to] swear on this goddamn job!’”
Not only are pasties filling, they have staying power as a tradition. Long past mining’s peak, pasties are now more popular than ever in the upper reaches of Minnesota, Michigan and let’s not forget Wisconsin.
1 of 6
Jack Rendulich
A Passion for Pasties
From chopping and mixing ingredients to rolling and crimping the dough, Chef Steve Pedley of Savories in Duluth does by himself what it can take dozens of church ladies (and church gentlemen) to do in preparing pasties. Of course, Chef Steve doesn’t make quite as many.
2 of 6
Jack Rendulich
A Passion for Pasties
3 of 6
Jack Rendulich
A Passion for Pasties
4 of 6
Jack Rendulich
A Passion for Pasties
5 of 6
Jack Rendulich
A Passion for Pasties
6 of 6
Jack Rendulich
A Passion for Pasties
The Politics of Pasties
These debates can make even pacifists pugnacious:
What to put on a pasty. Most folks use no coverups, but catsup or gravy are regionally popular, with Yoopers (from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula) favoring catsup and shuddering at the use of gravy by downstaters. Minnesota Iron Ranger Monsignor McDowell likes a pat of butter. Families may cook their own ethnic-based sauce, even hot sauce. Industrious Yoopers market a variety of concoctions with Toivo and Eino’s Really Secret Pasty Sauce among the most popular.
Rutabagas vs. no rutabagas. Many hold the firm belief that a pasty isn’t a pasty without rutabagas, which are quite traditional and maybe with good reason.
Rutabagas, a cabbage-turnip hybrid, are a cold-weather crop well suited to Scandinavia, Britain and our northern states. Though not a great source of Vitamin C, rutabagas were a significant source for populations where better sources (such as citrus) were once unavailable. Rutabagas store well all winter and when consumed in sufficient quantities, the Vitamin C adds up.
Tip: Whether you’re militant for or against rutabagas, pasty aficionados in the Great Lakes Basin prefer two pronunciations: rutabeggies or rutabaggers. Practice up so you’ll fit in.
The large lard debate. Traditionalists hold fast that lard makes the best crust. New Agers replace it with butter, margarine or a variety of shortenings.
Potatoes. No debate. Potatoes are in.
Venison. A popular ingredient during hunting season.
Boutique pasties. There has been an explosion of pasty take-offs, including fudge pasties and Mexican, breakfast, vegetarian and a bite-sized hors d’oeuvres. (What would a ham-fisted miner of yore think about a party platter of petite pasties?)
The good news is that the pasty palate is highly individual, and the arguments aren’t so much region to region as recipe to recipe. Legend has it that Cornish women were so inventive with ingredients that the devil didn’t dare enter Cornwall for fear he’d be cooked in a crust. The Cornish were skilled miners who went all over the world to set up operations, including Australia’s Copper Coast, where they put wallaby and kangaroo meat into pasties. According to Yvonne Lockwood, Ph.D., curator of Folk Life at Michigan State University Museum, carrots may be a spin added by the Finns. She calls the pasty “the fast food of the Upper Peninsula; it started out as Cornish, became multiethnic and is now regional,” with easy availability at farmers’ markets, restaurants, supermarkets, VFW halls, gas stations and bakeries. Yvonne, who studies food traditions, explains that originally the meat-and-potato pasty in America was more diversified – people used what they had – which is why stamping initials was important. Despite the recent trend to diversify again – with the veggie and breakfast versions, etc. – the meat-and-potato pasty has become standardized. People today, too busy to make them at home, form their opinion of what belongs in a pasty from the ubiquitous pasty fund-raiser.
Jack Rendulich
A Passion for Pasties
The pasty was originally the creation of Cornish wives to feed their mine-working husbands with something easy to pack, to handle and to fill a hungry appetite. A big appetite is still required, even when the pasty is prepared by Chef Steve Pedley for customers who probably aren’t doing the heavy work of a miner.
By your pasty, you will be judged
Not only priests and pastors, but parents, too, have found that pasties pay prettily. Such fund-raisers are endemic to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the Iron Range of Minnesota. Here in mining territory, some pasty volunteers request time away from jobs to work “crust crew” or a 10-hour “chop-n-peel” shift, and area employers know what this means. In Newberry, Michigan, Alice Walker is interim superintendent of Tahquamenon Area Schools, but she is not a dab hand with crust. She’s been asked to roll pasty crust exactly two times.
“If you’re known to be a good roller, you get called every week. During the school year, we seldom go a weekend without renting our school kitchen for a pasty sale. Everyone in this area knows what they are – a roller, a crust crimper, a peeler. The jobs are very specific; you might be a carrot person, or an aerator who pricks the finished pasties with a fork before baking.”
Workers are serious enough to bring their own favorite peelers and rolling pins.
Marcella Norman, 82, has long been Newberry’s “Queen of Pasties.” Regardless of what group needed money, Marcella ran sales at Tahquamenon Area Schools. She is adamant that a typical weekend pasty sale requires 30 workers. It goes something like this:
Thursday: Friends help Marcella get a jump on food preparation by coming to her home to peel 60 pounds of carrots and clean 28 stalks of celery.
Friday afternoon at school: 10 folks peel 400 pounds of potatoes by hand (that’s eight 50-pound boxes). Cube the potatoes, cover them with water and refrigerate them in trash can-sized containers. (Worried about that volume of potato peelings clogging the drain? Marcella says, “If somebody’s got cows, they’ll take the peelings home for fodder.”) Cube the carrots and celery. Mix dry crust ingredients with lard in individual batches and bag them. The crew goes through 100 pounds of lard, one cup at a time.
Saturday morning: Add water to each batch of dough, roll out and cut around a 9-inch pie pan to get perfect circles. Stack pastry circles between waxed paper. Mix meat and vegetables in mixer. Place one heaping cup of mixture on each crust round, fold in half. Crimpers, dipping fingers into Cool Whip containers of cold water, pinch the crust closed to resemble a half moon. Bake batches of 60 for one hour in four convection ovens. Each is wrapped in foil and often placed in a buyer’s waiting hands, so fresh and hot that those who eat them right away can get burned.
This assembly line yields 1,200 pasties and typically clears $1,500 profit. The going price of pasties in Newberry is $2.50. On Saturday – sale day – work is done by noon and they’re sold out by 1 p.m. On rare occasions when pasties remain, they give a yell to the local radio station to make an announcement, and people flock down. During hunting season, they always run out as people buy a lot of extras.
Marcella refers to her decades of pasty-prep as her pride and joy. “We’ve made thousands of dollars and sent Newberry’s school kids to New York, Washington, and every year we send the entire seventh grade to a three-day science camp. I don’t know what our school children would have done without the pasty money.”
Marcella learned to volunteer from her mother who, despite having 13 children, worked at home on pasty sales by hand-cutting the tinfoil and waxed paper (foil squares to wrap the hot-baked pasty, waxed paper squares to separate freshly rolled crusts). Now they buy foils already cut, and here’s another tip from Marcella: Bake them on parchment paper because some pasties leak, then it takes a lot of scraping to clean those pans. Also, buy frozen chopped onions. It’s expensive, but no crying.
Marcella has passed her role, and rolling pin, to friend Virgene Swanson, but still orders the groceries. “I still do the celery and carrots so there’s no waste. Some people cut 2 inches off the bottom of celery! So I do it myself.”
Marcella sprinkles the celery ends and carrot peelings on her large country lot, where deer, bear and sand hill cranes enjoy them. She shares her recipe from memory, saying, “Why not, most groups around here use it anyway.”
In Minnesota, Father McDowell served Holy Spirit parish in Virginia, when it first sold pasties in 1977. “We needed to raise money and searched to find something that people wanted to buy. I had no idea what a reliable supplemental income the pasties would prove to be.”
Pasties remodeled that church’s kitchen, bathrooms and social hall and supported projects at Virginia’s Marquette school over the years. It was difficult for Patrick McDowell to let go of his mother’s cubed, layered pasty style. But slicing and cubing meat on a large scale wasn’t practical, so they coarsely ground it.
Three decades later Jeanne Lamourea, age 80, is Holy Spirit’s head pasty lady. “We make about 1,400 pasties the last week of every month, September through May. We used to make 2,000, but we’re all getting older.”
Not only do they all sell, there is always a waiting list, plenty of advance and standing orders. Two states away, these Minnesotans follow much the same pasty protocol as the Michiganders, right down to insisting it’s a 30- to 35-person job. They prepare vegetables and crust on Monday and bake and sell half on Tuesday, half on Wednesday. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, they start at 4 a.m. and when they’ve crimped the last pasty for the oven, around 8:30 a.m., the workers always sing “Amen,” the version made famous by Sydney Poitier in “Lilies of the Field.”
“It’s three hard days of work per month, but we don’t need other fund-raisers,” Jeanne says. And it still is the reliable income that surprised their priest decades ago, clearing almost $4,000 per sale. Their price recently went from $3.50, the going pasty sale price on Minnesota’s ranges, to $4.
“Our pasty is so large that some folks cut it in half to serve.”
In Minnesota, Jeanne says, many Rangers top pasties with catsup or beef or brown gravy. The rutabaga debate is not raging in Minnesota, she says. At least 99 percent of her customers are pro-rutabaga.
Michigander Marcella Norman and Minnesotan Jeanne Lamourea have much in common. Both octogenarians, they both take pride in their pasty making and, without knowing each other, both give the same reason for doing it: It’s fun.
“We love the camaraderie,” says Jeanne. “We can’t wait for fall when pasty season starts.”
Marcella has made many lifelong friends doing this work.
“You can’t roll crust for hours next to somebody without getting to know them pretty well.”
Pasties in the modern world – Pasty.com
When Charlie Hopper became administrator 13 years ago of Still Waters, an assisted living home in Calumet, Michigan, he had no idea that his future would lie as general manager of a pasty-lauding Internet site and a U.P. Internet service.
Yet that is his job today as general manager of Pasty Net and Pasty Central.
Originally, the two enterprises were meant to bolster the finances of Still Waters, which did not receive the state aid available for a nursing home facility.
On the Pasty.com Website, Charlie concentrated on posting pictures of typical U.P. events, including shots of folks preparing the pasties served monthly to residents. Displaced Yoopers all over the country loved the photos photos, and many wanted that taste of “home.” They sent desperate messages like: “SEND PASTIES NOW – Put a bill in and I’ll send back the money.”
Demands turned into opportunity.
Still Waters got a food license and mailed out frozen pasties. The staff and residents learned this new trade, even how to make dry ice. It wasn’t until they’d shipped 1,708 orders that the home stopped to do accounting of the “honor system” (send pasties and a bill now, get the money later).
Of the 1,708 shipped orders, only five had not paid the invoice that accompanied the food. When sent past due statements, three sent the money plus orders for more pasties. In keeping with regional politeness, we’ll say no more about those remaining two.
Charlie’s other business has grown into pasty.net, a full Internet service provider.
Pasty Central can still be found at www.pasty.com. It has grown into an online hometown for those who live in the U.P. or who long to return home from around the world. It’s also the place to order pasties.
Still Waters, which had long faced financial challenges, sold Pasty Central to the employees in 2001. This helped to keep the home open for five more years, but it closed in October 2006. The Pasty Project will continue to support elders through Little Brothers Friends of The Elderly, which provides transportation and other assistance. Little Brothers, under Copper Country United Way, is funded by contributions (not government).
As for the mail-order pasty business, it has shipped more than 300,000 frozen pasties to customers, restaurants and grocery stores since it started keeping count. It even provides pasties for the Minnesota State Fair.
The work of making pasties is no longer done by the residents. But people still order with a “yell” or a “holler” – Yooperisms for telephoning or e-mailing – to Pasty Central.
So fear not if your palette pines for pasties in the absence of a fund-raiser. If you’re in the region, pasties are in restaurants, bakeries, delis, grocery stores or gas station convenience stores. Just as people have favored recipes, there is fierce loyalty to pasty joints.
Traveling Highway 2 from Wisconsin to the U.P., you will start to pass pasty places. In Copper Country in the Keweenaw Peninsula, don’t miss the pasties at Toni’s Country Kitchen in Laurium. Pasty sales surpass all other items on their full-service breakfast and lunch menu. Toni’s provides pasties by the hundreds for class and family reunions and, naturally, fund-raisers. Owner Eric Frimodig calls them a staple food.
“Up here, you stop for pasties like folks elsewhere stop at Hardee’s for burgers. They make a quick, easy supper. And while people are at it, they often stock up.”
If you’re persnickety, call ahead to special order. Eric says, “In addition to the standard beef-rutabaga-onion-potato pasty, I’ve done chicken, garlic, vegetable and even raisin with meat (the favorite of a local customer of Middle-Eastern heritage).”
In Michigan, there’s also Keweenaw Berry Farm in Chassell, The Hut/Pasty Central Express in Kearsarge, and Harbor Town Cafe or Syl’s Cafe in Ontonagon.
In Virginia, Minnesota, Joe Prebonich, owner of Italian Bakery Inc., says, “Pasties are a pretty big thing up here.”
Made fresh every Thursday, the pasties can be taken out or eaten there. Italian Bakery supplies pasties to the Eveleth Italian Bakery, Pep’s Bake Shop in Virginia and makes veggie pasties for Natural Harvest Co-Op Inc. Eveleth also has K&B Drive-Inn, where year-round car hop service delivers hot pasties or you can order frozen to go (buy 12, get 1 free).
Hibbing’s Sunrise Deli makes 240 pasties each week. Besides take-out or eat-in, Sunrise supplies pasties to the Super One grocery and Cobb Cook. Owners Mary and Tom Forti have good news for homesick pasty lovers in the Twin Cities – they ship to Jerry’s in Edina and Village Market in Prior Lake.
In Duluth, you find pasties at Savories-fine foods to go! or at Penelope’s Pasties on Miller Trunk Highway in Hermantown.
Pasties probably will never replace pizza or burgers as national favorites, but we of the mining states love our regional food. The only question remaining is: What’s in your pasty?
Ann O’Brien Treacy, a registered dietitian with a Master’s degree in Nutrition Science, as an offering to the gremlins of the waistline, advises to eat just the top pasty crust because most of the fat is in the pastry. To Ann, we say, “Yeah, right.”