The cheesesteak pretzel may seem newfangled (and gross) but its lineage might be linked to one of England's indigenous foods, the Cornish pasty. (That's pronounced PASS-tee, not PASTE-tee, lest you have visions of strippers.)
Traced back to 16th century England, these handheld pies predate the golden age of sandwiches and may have inspired some of America's classics 'wiches, from the cheesesteak to the Reuben.
Resembling a turnover or an empanada, these semicircular, crusty pies provided easy underground lunches for miners in Cornwall and, later, Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The workers' wives would bake the pies, often marking the miner's initials in the dough and stuffing them with "courses": meat, vegetables, and other savory fillings on one side, and a sweet fruity dessert on the other.
A meat-and-potato meal, popular pasty stuffings include thinly sliced steak or ground beef, onions, tubers, and turnips. So you see, the cheesesteak pretzel could be called a pasty variation, if an ill-advised one. Apparently, the two-course pasty is a lost art, but that's one of my favorite parts of the pasty story. I think it's primed for a comeback.
Source: Flickr User Joyosity
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