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Hidalgo's pleated Cornish miner pastry from Real del Monte, filled with hand-diced beef, potato, leek, and parsley. The pleated seam was the miner's clean handle. Eaten hot, in the hand.
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.
The paste arrived in Hidalgo with the Cornish miners recruited by the Compania de Aventureros de Minas de Pachuca y Real del Monte beginning in 1825, when English investors took over the Spanish-era silver mines in the Sierra de Pachuca. The original Cornish pasty contained beef, potato, swede, and onion, sealed with a rope crimp along one side so the miner could hold the seam, eat the body, and discard the contaminated edge after handling arsenic-laden ore. The Mexican adaptation replaced suet with manteca de cerdo, swede with leek and parsley, and over the next century expanded to sweet fillings (pina, mole verde, tinga) that the Cornish would not recognize, while Real del Monte itself was twinned with Redruth, Cornwall, in 2008 in formal recognition of the shared culinary heritage.
Quantity
4 cups
plus more for rolling
Quantity
1 teaspoon
Quantity
1/2 cup
cold, cut into small pieces
Quantity
1/2 cup
cold, cut into small cubes
Quantity
3/4 cup
plus more as needed
Quantity
1 pound
trimmed of sinew and diced into 1/4-inch cubes
Quantity
1 pound (about 2 medium)
peeled and diced into 1/4-inch cubes
Quantity
1
white and pale green parts only, diced small and rinsed thoroughly
Quantity
1/2 cup
finely chopped
Quantity
2 teaspoons
Quantity
1 teaspoon
Quantity
1 tablespoon
Quantity
1
beaten with 1 tablespoon milk, for the wash
| Ingredient | Quantity |
|---|---|
| all-purpose flourplus more for rolling | 4 cups |
| kosher salt | 1 teaspoon |
| manteca de cerdo (pork lard)cold, cut into small pieces | 1/2 cup |
| unsalted buttercold, cut into small cubes | 1/2 cup |
| ice-cold waterplus more as needed | 3/4 cup |
| beef sirloin or skirt steaktrimmed of sinew and diced into 1/4-inch cubes | 1 pound |
| waxy potatoespeeled and diced into 1/4-inch cubes | 1 pound (about 2 medium) |
| large leekwhite and pale green parts only, diced small and rinsed thoroughly | 1 |
| flat-leaf parsleyfinely chopped | 1/2 cup |
| kosher salt (for filling) | 2 teaspoons |
| freshly ground black pepper | 1 teaspoon |
| Worcestershire sauce | 1 tablespoon |
| eggbeaten with 1 tablespoon milk, for the wash | 1 |
Whisk the flour and salt in a wide bowl. Add the cold lard and cold butter. Work the fats into the flour with your fingertips until the mixture looks like coarse cornmeal with some pea-sized pieces still visible. Those pieces are the flake. Pour in the ice water, a little at a time, mixing with a fork until the dough just comes together. Do not knead it. Press it into a flat disc, wrap it, and refrigerate for at least one hour. La manteca es el sabor and a cold dough is the difference between a paste and a sad bread.
Dice the beef, potato, and leek into 1/4-inch cubes. Cubes, not minced, not ground. Real del Monte cooks insist on this. You should be able to see each ingredient in the bite. Combine in a bowl with the parsley, salt, pepper, and Worcestershire. Mix with your hands. Do not cook the filling first. The beauty of the paste is that everything cooks together inside the dough, in the steam of its own juices.
Divide the dough into 12 equal pieces. Roll each into a ball, then roll out on a lightly floured surface into a circle about 6 inches across and 1/8-inch thick. Stack them with squares of parchment between if you are not filling immediately. Keep the dough cool. If it gets warm, return it to the refrigerator for ten minutes before going on.
Heat the oven to 375F. Place about 1/3 cup of filling on one half of each disc, leaving a 1/2-inch border. Brush the border with the egg wash. Fold the empty half over the filling to form a half-moon. Press the edges together firmly with your fingers to seal. Pat the paste so the filling sits compact inside.
Hold the sealed edge between your thumb and forefinger. Fold a small section over itself at an angle, press it down, then fold the next section, working along the entire curve. This is the repulgue, the Cornish rope crimp the miners' wives carried to Hidalgo. The pleat is not decoration. It seals the paste so the juices stay inside and it gives the miner a clean handle to hold while he ate the rest. Así se hace y punto.
Arrange the pastes on a parchment-lined sheet pan, spaced apart. Cut a small slit in the top of each so steam can escape. Brush the tops with the egg wash. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes, until the crust is deep golden brown and you can hear the filling bubbling inside through the slit. The bottom should be firm and dry, not pale. A pale paste is an underbaked paste.
Let the pastes rest for five minutes on a rack. The filling is molten and will scald you if you bite in straight from the oven. Eat hot, in the hand. No fork, no plate, no salsa unless you grew up putting salsa verde on them, in which case do what your grandmother did. Recetas probadas y garantizadas.
1 serving (about 140g)
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