A Yummy Yooper Tradition

Today Joey and I indulged in one last bit of Michigan nostalgia before my trip to Australia, while enabling Joey to stock up meals for the month that he won't have his favorite chef in residence. We made pasties (pasty rhymes with nasty; not hasty), a traditional meat pie enjoyed by generations of families in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

Joey's Finnish ancestors learned to make pasties from their Welsh neighbors in the Keweenaw Peninsula. Welsh miners were among the earliest residents recruited to Michigan's resource-rich upper regions, to work in the iron and copper mines. They brought with them a recipe that had several benefits in a mining lifestyle. Pasties are filled with ground meat and hearty winter root vegetables that are cheap, filling and thermally retentive, if not particularly flavorful. It is a long way down to the cold, damp tunnels of a mine, and with no opportunity to come to the surface for lunch, the miners needed a meal that would stay hot for hours and warm their bellies at mid-day. A pasty can also be eaten with one hand gripping only the bottom corner of the crust, which comes in handy if you are covered with toxic metal dust. The diner can simply eat down to the contaminated corner and then throw that part away.

Early Finnish immigrants adopted this dish into their staple diet, and as new waves of Finnish miners eventually replaced the Welsh miners, they came to regard the pasty as an integral part of their Finnish-American culture. I understand that a similar phenomenon may have occurred in South Australia's Yorke Peninsula, with the pasty evolving into what is now called an Australian meat pie. If true, this is an interesting point of commonality in our heritage.

Pasties differ slightly around the world, but in Michigan they are typically stuffed with ground beef, potatoes, carrots, onions and rutabagas. Modern palates often prefer them drowning in ketchup or gravy for added flavor. Pasties are available in restaurants and specialty shops throughout the Upper Peninsula and are enjoyed by both locals (or "Yoopers") and tourists (whom the Yoopers call "trolls.") If you visit Michigan, be sure to try one.