Pastes Hidalguenses de Real del Monte

Pastes are from Hidalgo. Specifically from Real del Monte, the old silver-mining town in the Sierra Madre where Cornish miners arrived in the 1820s to work the shafts and brought their food with them. The Cornish pasty became the paste, with an s, pronounced PAH-stay. Same dough, same crimp on the top, same idea of a self-contained meal a working man could carry into the mine. But the filling changed. The miners' wives, and then the Mexican women who married into the community, added chile serrano, switched to manteca de cerdo, and over a century and a half made it a dish that belongs to Hidalgo and to no one else.

The original is the paste of carne con papa, beef and potato with the chile verde that makes it Mexican. There are now sweet versions filled with pineapple, with rice pudding, with mole. There are tinga pastes, chicharron pastes, frijoles pastes. The carne con papa is the mother. Start there.

What matters in a paste: the dough is half lard and half butter, not all butter. The filling goes in raw and cooks inside the crust, which is why the dice has to be small and even. The crimp sits on top, not on the side, so a man with dirty hands could hold it by the crimp and eat the rest clean. Every detail comes from the mine. This is not a fusion dish in the modern marketing sense. It is two food traditions that lived together in one town for two centuries and produced something neither one of them could have made alone. Cada estado, su propia cocina. Hidalgo's is this one.