Pasties: A UP Tradition

Pasties, photo by G0Da.

Lehto’s Famous Pasties are located 7 1/2 miles west of the Mackinac Bridge and the town of St. Ignace. I was pretty shocked to find that I didn’t have a post about pasties on Michigan in Pictures. As the official food of the Upper Peninsula, it definitely merits one, so here goes!

Real Michigan Food: The Pasty on Absolute Michigan says that the pasty came to the Upper Peninsula with tin miners from Cornwall England in the 1800s. Along with a lot of mining knowledge, the Cornish brought advanced lunch technology: the small, portable, and oh-so-filling pasty.

The Cultural Context of the Pasty – yes, we take our meals seriously in Michigan – has even more history and some recipes. If cooking isn’t your thing, head over to Pasty.com’s Pasty Central to buy pasties online. Pasty Central is an employee-owned company in Calumet that has shipped over 300,000 pasties.

You can find other places to purchase pasties (and more articles) at Absolute Michigan keyword pasty and the Absolute Michigan pool has a number of Michigan pasty photos including a perplexingly popular pasty picture and this pasty packed postcard (includes history and recipe). As with just about anything, there’s a Wikipedia entry for the pasty and pasties (not to be confused with other uses of pasties).

I should add that the photo above is part of Dan’s Michigan slideshow, something you should definitely check out if you are a fan of photography with 110% of the Michigan RDA for Awesome.