Best pasty ever: Suomi Cafe in Copper Harbor, in Michigan's UP. The cook came out with a glass of flour and water paste to paint the words 'Hot Pasties' on the window when they were just coming out of the oven. Maybe it was the clear, crisp air (the UP in early June) but 50yrs later I can taste them like it was right now.

PS. Cornish-from-Cornwall neighbour of mine told me that proper pasties had *three* kinds of boiled meat -- mutton, beef and pork -- all fatty ('men like fatty meat') plus diced onion, potato, turnip and (maybe) carrot, moistened with broth and baked in a stiff crust. This is not a short crust,ie, not made with a lot of shortening, so more like a traditional British meat pie crust, which was mainly flour and water. It was intended as a baking pan than an edible, has more in common with pottery than pastry. She told me that miner's wives (such as her mum)would send their husband's off to the mines with a couple of hot pasties wrapped in a towel in their dinnerpaid and they would still be, well, not hot maybe, but warm at dinnertime (ie, noon meal). A hot meal in a cold, damp mine -- a good thing to send with your man underground.

She also told me about working in a little Cornish resort hotel when she was a girl. One of the permanent guests was a titled lady who send her laundry out -- to the south of France, where the laundresses ironed marvelous crystal pleats into her underwear. She also told me that the bootblacks blacked not just the uppers but the soles of gentlemen's shoes, as it wouldn't do for their shoes to look actually *walked in*. Thank you, neighbour Joyce, peace be to you.

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