How the Cornish pasty became a Mexican delicacy

By Elias Kühn

In the early 19th century, the tin mines in Cornwall, the county on England’s rugged south-western tip, fell into decline. Many miners crossed the Atlantic in search of work. They had an especially warm welcome in Mexico, whose war of independence from Spain (1810-21) had left its infrastructure battered and its mines flooded. Trekking 250 miles through swamps, thicket and rainforests, hundreds of Cornish miners settled around the silver mines of Real del Monte, a mountainous town in the state of Hidalgo in central Mexico. They brought the tools and expertise needed to dig for treasure, as well as a treasure of their own: a half-moon-shaped pocket pie with a meat and vegetable filling.

The Cornish pasty, or paste as it came to be known in Mexico, was adopted as a local delicacy. Real del Monte’s cobbled streets are lined with red-tiled bakeries that emanate the aroma of freshly baked pasties. There is even a Museo del Paste, which features a steel oven and rusty mining tools, and where visitors can practise the “pull, tuck and pinch” technique that gives the pasty its distinctive crust. It was the only one in the world until St Austell in Cornwall followed suit last year. Real del Monte also hosts an annual pasty festival. The main event is the baking and eating of a 12-foot-long colossus. Once they’ve digested it, festival-goers dance the tango, mambo and rumba into the early hours. This year’s festival, in October, will screen “Ora sí ¡tenemos que ganar!” (“This time, we have to win!”), a Mexican film about miners, presumably fuelled by pasties, who mutiny against their mine’s heartless American owner.