The town that eats the most Cornish pasties in the world – and it’s not in Cornwall

There’s a place in the world that is obsessed with Cornish pasties and it’s 5,321 miles from where you’d expect.

The British pastry-based snack is normally associated with Cornwall but people in the small Mexican mining town of Mineral del Monte have been scoffing them since the 1800s.

Mexican links with Cornwall date back to 1824, when Cornish miners emigrated to Hidalgo in search of silver and gold.

According to the University of Exeter, the Cornish brought with them the ‘machinery of the industrial revolution’, along with traditional English customs such as football and cricket leagues.

But they also brought along the ingredients of the Cornish pasty.

Its widely believed the crimped crust of the Cornish pasty was created so miners could hold them without getting them dirty.

Pastes have since become a popular snack not just in Mineral del Monte, but across the whole of Mexico.

Chefs have put their own twist on the pasty, with fillings including spicy Mexican mole or pineapple, blueberry or cheese.

Isabel Arriaga Lozano was born into a paste-making family and has been cooking the pastry for some 30 years.

She told Associated Press: ‘I think around 50% of us here make a living off this.

‘It’s, above all, the love we put into every paste that makes it a good product. In Mexico we always look for that spicy ingredient – we add pepper, we add parsley.’

Such is the Mexican love for the pasty, that Mineral del Monte is actually home to the world’s first Cornish pasty museum, Museo del Paste.

In 2014, the then Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall, Charles and Camilla, paid the museum a visit. 

The site explores the history of the Cornish connection to Mexico, and even allows visitors to create their own pasties under expert supervision from local pasty makers.

And each October Mineral del Monte hosts its own three-day International Cornish Pasty Festival which sees food enthusiasts converge on the Mexican town to try an array of pasties – both Mexican and English.

One festival-goer called the treats at the festival ‘delicious.’

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