Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T L Y M O N T A N A M A G A Z I N E • F A L L 2 0 2 1 48 RECIPE FOR CORNISH PASTIES FILLING: skirt or flank steak, or loin tip, potatoes, onions, salt and pepper PASTRY: 3 cups flour, 2 cups lard, 1 teaspoon salt (added to flour), water or milk Cut lard into flour. Add only enough water to make pastry stick together. Roll out rounds to size desired for each pasty. Begin by layering sliced potatoes on half the round, then sliced onion, salt and pepper to taste; next a layer of meat (sliced or diced) and more salt and pepper; add another layer of potatoes, then onions, more salt and pepper and top with a pat of butter. Pull dough over and up, gathering and crimping across the top and dampening the dough to seal. Make a vent in the top. Brush pasties with a mixture of 1 egg yolk and 1 tablespoon water before baking. This seals in the juice and gives the pasties a golden brown color. Pasties made with lard might otherwise be white after baking. Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes, then at 325 degrees for 1 hour. Melt 1 teaspoon butter with 1 tablespoon water and pour twice in vent during last 15 minutes of baking. From the Butte Heritage Cookbook, used with permission courtesy of the Butte Silver Bow Arts Foundation. Recipe donated by Mrs. Betty Aultman. The advantage of the pasty to Butte's working class went beyond a simple taste of home. The hand-pies were very portable, easy to tote in a tin lunch pail, relatively easy to make, and they stayed warm for hours. Should they get cold in the depths of the mine, all you had to do was put one in your shovel and heat the shovel over coals or a fire. Howev- er, you did have to remember that you were doing so—ap- parently, they were the cause of a fire at least once in the history of American mining when, left unattended, a pasty overloaded with combustible lard and suet burst into flame. Of course, this wasn't likely to happen, as the average miner eyed their pasty closely, snatching it when it was warm enough to eat. And there are some, including the aforementioned Wil- liam A. Burke, who say that "[s]erved cold as a midnight snack, or at luncheon, a pasty always speaks for itself." In the poorly lit depths of Butte's copper mines, one pasty looked a lot like another. Naturally, it then became a prob- lem of identification—which pasty is mine? To that end, the miners' wives would often scratch their husband's initials into the crust, sometimes on both ends, lest someone eat half of their pasty and set it aside. And while many American pasties today are not made with a crimped ridge like a pie crust, the historical Cornish Jack pasty usually was. This way, the min- er, whose hands were black with soot, or worse, arsenic, had a convenient handle to hold the pasty by. Others maintain that the Cornish, occasionally given to superstition, would "sacri- fice" the crimped handle as an offering to the hungry ghosts and goblins that live in the caverns of the earth. Still others, like the Cornish food historian Glyn Hughes, say that the notion of the crimped edge being a handle is hogwash. He told the host of a popular English television program, "We've been back through literally thousands and thousands of newspapers and magazines going back to the 18th century and we can find absolutely no mention of it anywhere." Instead, he maintains, miners were more likely to eat their pasties out of cloth bags brought for that purpose. Expertly handled, however, THE FINISHED PRODUCT IS SOMETHING TO CAUSE THE TRUE GOURMET TO CONTEMPLATE ON THOUGHTS, ETHEREAL AND OTHERWORLDLY. A REAL PASTY DOES THOSE THINGS TO A HUMAN."

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