Marquette is the big city of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and a great place to taste the U.P.’s pasties. One favorite in-town source is Crossroads Lounge, which promises its pasty is one full pound. It is a beauty, loaded with beef and pork, potatoes, rutabagas, and onions enveloped in a sturdy, hand-crimped crust. Crossroads Lounge also offers skillet breakfasts, hamburgers, Lake Superior whitefish, and a fabulous Friday fish fry as well as Keno and sports events on the TVs and a full roster of adult libations. Jean-Kay’s is a long-standing pasty-lover’s destination in Marquette, made the way grandmother Jean Kay Harsch did it, with suet instead of lard and plenty of rutabaga. A short drive out of the city leads to Irontown Pasties in Negaunee and Lawry’s Pasty Shop in Ishpeming. Also in Ishpeming, you’ll find Ralph’s Italian Deli, which serves its own fine version of a pasty as well as the unique Upper Peninsula sausage known as cudighi. Almost always presented as a patty in a sandwich, cudighi is distinguished by perfumy spices. Its fans like it so much that the butchers who make it in back of Ralph’s regularly ship it to expatriate Yoopers (residents of the U.P.) who can’t get it anywhere else.
The pasty (say pass-tee, not pay-stee) began as a portable stew – meat and vegetables sealed inside a pastry crust -- that Michigan miners from Cornwall carried with them...
Following U.S. 41 beside the cobalt-blue calm of Lake Superior, then wending up the Keweenaw Peninsula through a blaze of October leaves to Copper Harbor where the highway ends,...
