Pastes de Carne con Papa de Real del Monte

This is from Real del Monte, Hidalgo. A small mining town in the Sierra de Pachuca that the locals call Mineral del Monte, sitting at 2,700 meters above sea level where the air is thin and the winters bite. The paste belongs to that altitude, to that cold, to that town. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one is Hidalgo's answer to a question almost nobody asks: what happens when Cornish miners marry Mexican women?

In the 1820s, English mining companies brought Cornish workers to Real del Monte to operate the silver mines. The men carried their pasties in tin lunch pails down into the shafts, the dough pleated along one edge so a miner with arsenic on his hands could hold the crimped seam, eat the rest, and throw away the dirty handle. When those miners married locally, the kitchens changed. Suet became manteca de cerdo. The recipe stayed but the fat that holds it together is now Mexican. La manteca es el sabor and this is a clean example of why.

The filling is hand-diced. Not minced, not ground. You should see the cube of beef, the cube of potato, the green of the leek, the parsley flecked through. Real del Monte cooks will inspect the cut of a paste before they bite it. If the filling is mush, the cook was lazy.

My mother never made pastes. She was from Jalisco and the recipe did not travel that far. I learned this one in Pachuca, in the kitchen of a señora whose grandmother ran a paste shop on Calle Hidalgo for forty years. She told me the only rule that mattered: the pleat goes on the side, not on top, and you eat it standing up. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.