Old Fashioned Vegetarian Food

[Glitterbiscuits]

I ate at Good Earth in Leicester last week. It's a totally vegetarian restaurant. It's been open nearly 50 years.

The menu is great, so unpretentious. I'd love to recreate some of their style of dishes. They had things like parsnip loaf, bean bake. Much more of an emphasis on grains and pulses.

I used to make a great nut loaf and a veggie shepherd's pie.
We eat too much pasta, chilli, curry etc.

I want to move back to basics. Can anyone suggest some old ( I want to say hippy style) dishes they love or used to love?

This is a really good recipe for vegetarian haggis. It happens to be vegan. You wouldn't really want cheese in it!

https://thepeskyvegan.com/recipes/vegan-haggis/

My 80s vegetarian diet was very tinned tomato heavy.

Plymouth Arts Centre was my nearest vegetarian cafe back then and they did fab bean burgers with a (tinned tomato based of course!) sauce. I think I have their recipe book still.

It's so hard to find a vegetarian restaurant these days.
I have fond memories of a quiche I ate at one in Gillygate York about 30 years ago.
Wonderful chunks of cheese in it!

I loved Food for Thought in Covent Garden too- especially their bread- brick like slices of wholemeal hessian!
I’ve got the Enchanted Broccoli Forest by Mollie Katzen which has the American take on this kind of veggie cooking- I hardly cook from it anymore due to fussy children and coeliac DH but still love reading it and admiring her hand lettering and illustrations.
And of course Cranks- special mention to the vegetable crumble.

We went to a Michelin starred rooftop vegetarian restaurant in Rome in the summer. They had a vegan menu but it was limited.. the main menu was vegetarian and I have to say it was to the standard of a top London restaurant.. nothing like that as far as I know in the uk.

Thanks so much for this thread! I still have my Rose Elliot and Cranks cook books. I used to have a Saturday job at Dillons in Gower Street and used to head to Cranks for Homity Pie at lunchtime as a treat. And the Gate, Food for Thought and King's Pantry were all favourites of mine at different times. I make a Shepherd's Pie with old fashioned soya mince still. And Cranks Armenian Soup (dried apricots - how exotic).

Great thread OP.

In winter I quite often make this, which I think has the vibe you mean:

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/vegetable-stew-herby-dumplings.

The pearl barley makes it, and the herby cheesy dumplings.

Sosmix! From the packet, made with water. Made a fine toad in the hole.

I came to say Cranks too! I have two of their books and the fast 30 minute book is excellent. It does have a few recipes with miso if that's ok though!

I picked up the Mildred's book on kindle app for a £1.

Delia's complete cookery course has some super recipes and so does the Reader's Digest book from the 70s.

Thank you. And I am daft - I wrongly wrote brown lentils instead of brown rice. It would probably be delicious with lentils too though, or a combi!

I used to love Food for Thought restaurant in Covent Garden.

God, how I adored that place!

But anyway - I’m amazed no one has yet mentioned:

Hodmedod’s

I’m pescetarian, never go near fake meat (though I did eat a perfectly delicious vegan burger - lentil and sweet potato - in a pub today) and Hodmedod’s is the absolute mainstay of my larder. Endless varieties of wholemeal and spelt flour, all the lentils, beans, split peas, chickpeas and grains a stomach could desire - and - recipes for every single item. Good, old fashioned, hearty stuff. I’ve been ordering from them for a few years and honestly can’t imagine living without them now. In the past when I’ve recommended them here a few people have exclaimed over prices - it really pays to buy in bulk if you have room and demand for 5 kilo sacks.

What I particularly love is the emphasis on agricultural, environmental and historical research that they and their various suppliers engage in. The website is a complete education - the efforts made towards greater UK food production and biodiversity read like an adventure story.(A sobering one with all the increasing food insecurity.) It does mean I sometimes look askance at supermarket grocery lists that seem to contain very little properly nourishing food.

I think the recipes are still there. I make their Caribbean stew. Total hit in this house.

@aliabut that's not an old fashioned veggie recipe though is it?

This thread is making me want to make more vegetarian food. DH has been veg for years so it ought to be an easy change.

Unashamedly place marking! I was thinking the same thing recently about vegetarian food from yesteryear. I still have my Bean Book and a few other books which I keep promising myself to flick through. I have the original Linda McCartney book, but there's quite a heavy emphasis on soya protein which I no longer like. I was vegetarian for years and years. I still prefer vegetarian food though and am much more confident with preparing it as it was how I learned to cook properly.

@aramox1 I still buy Sosmix by mail order and love it made into a veggie toad in the hole.

A PP mentioned stuffed mushrooms. DH makes them by mashing up a tin of mixed beans in chili sauce and mixing it with onion, red/green peppers, piling it into big Portobello mushrooms and topping with a cheesy breadcrumb mix.

I had this until it fell apart,
Gail Duff's Vegetarian Cookbook.
Bought an old copy for my son when he said he was going veggie, and was a bit miffed when he left it behind at uni.
Might get myself another copy. I also had a wholefood cookery book (not entirely veggie) and I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the author.
One of the two had a recipe for broccoli in a spicy peanut butter sauce. Very easy, and delicious, and I can't quite remember it now.
I've got a spice drawer full of stuff I don't use, whereas I used to get by with a handful of staples, because in those days nobody assumed you could buy pomegranate molasses or whatever, and supplied passable subs in the recipes.

@New2024 I live in a town now, I miss the goats we had when I was little. Lovely creatures and great for reducing food waste!

I might go flip though some of my old books, I have quite the collection of old cookery books, I love all the old tableware and settings they did.

I’m exploring my Mum’s old cookbooks at present. Some vegetarian ones as people were - I think - quite open to meat free meals even though some will try to tell us we mostly lived on meat and two veg until circa 1986.

I have that book - Mrs Laden's recipes for Shaw! Also recommend the Rose Elliot original trilogy - The Bean Book, Not Just a Load of old Lentils and Simply Delicious (I think they were republished as an omnibus).

I would also second the recommendations of Sarah Brown and the Cranks book. Crank's homity pies, lentil and cheese wedges and Sarah Brown's Red Dragon Pie were all favourites with the DC.

I still regularly use the old books because like PP I hate the fake meat trend and whilst I love my more modern books they often lack the imaginative use of pulses, nuts and North European seaonal veg and herbs.

I do love the Asian and South American flavours and am totally a riceaholic, but there's something about the cold Scottish climate that demands hearty, bean and root veg heavy meals at times.

I think I'm going to make my mums cheese and veg pie with cheese scone crust tonight. With purple sprouting from the local farm.

Thank you for the tip - this looks good! Full archive is indeed there.

https://8thday.coop/recipes/caribbean-stew/

Many references to Cranks Homity Pie on this thread - here's the recipe. Must give this a go some time soon. https://www.cranks.co.uk/recipes/homity-pie/

Thank goodness for the internet. Many years ago I must have had a rush of blood to the head and given away my Cranks recipe book, Gail Duff's Vegetarian Cookbook and some other recipe books I'd really like to have now. Fortunately some of the recipes are online and if I really wanted to I could probably replace my hard copies.