The Hand-Pie With a Crust You Weren't Supposed to Eat

The U.P.’s beloved pasty comes with one of Michigan’s best lunchbox legends: miners were said to use its thick crust as a disposable handle.

The pasty (rhymes with “nasty,” not “tasty”) is a hand-held meat-and-vegetable pie that Cornish miners brought to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the mid-1800s, when they came to work the copper and iron mines. It was the perfect underground lunch: self-contained, filling, and able to stay warm for hours (you could even reheat it on a shovel held over a lamp). Potatoes and onions are the must-haves; rutabaga is traditional.

Here’s the part everyone loves to tell. Down in the mines, workers’ hands were often coated in arsenic-laden dust — so, the story goes, the thick, crimped crust along one edge did double duty as a built-in handle: miners would hold the pie by that crust, eat the rest, and toss the dirty end (some said they left it for the “mine ghosts”). We’ll be honest, though — some historians doubt this part, pointing to old photos of miners holding their pasties in cloth or paper and noting that hungry workers rarely threw food away. True or not, it’s the story the U.P. has always told. Either way, cooks would mark each pasty with the eater’s initials so everyone got the one packed to their taste.

When Cornish mining faded, the pasty lived on — adopted enthusiastically by Finnish and Italian immigrant families, who made it so thoroughly their own that many people assume it’s Finnish. (The great local debate: rutabaga or carrots? And do you top it with ketchup or gravy?)