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?

I still have the original Cranks book from the 80s - it’s falling apart but I love it. Same with some of the Rose Elliot books, and some by Sarah Brown and Sarah Bounds.
The vegan cookery books by Leah Leneman are good too - some of the recipes are a bit out there but there are some good ones.

I have to say I always thought homity pie had apple in it...have I imagined that? Or am I thinking of something else?

I have never encountered homity pie with apple in it!

Well OP can I just thank you for this thread. Off the back of it I've just ordered second hand copies of the Gail Duff and the Cranks.
Can't wait!
And they weren't expensive - but if you want to get the Cranks original just be careful, there's an updated version that has dropped some of the original recipes.

Tonight I'm making baked rice with spinach, herbs and cheese - for 200g rice, it calls for 120g cheese, 450g spinach and 3 eggs so I'm anticipating something with a bit of body. I'll do sauteed tomatoes with vinegar alongside.

Both recipes from Deborah Madison's 1990 book "The Savoury Way" and described as "a soothing, simple and reasonable supper". Reasonable

Well nobody wants an unreasonable supper to be fair 😁

Does anyone remember the Cranks wholemeal bread rolls which had masses of cheddar cheese melted on top and then were filled with mustard and cress? So filling you could barely move after eating one, but delicious

Try and acquire the Cranks recipe book. I'm not vegetarian but used it a lot. Mostly ingredients that I already had. They did a Celebrations one but the original is better.

This takes me back to my veggie days in the 90s. My favourite recipe is Sarah Brown's Cashew & Mushroom loaf - Sarah Brown's Layered Cashew and Mushroom Roast - Shoestring Cottage and we serve it with a mushroom and sherry sauce.

It wasn't Celebrations it was Entertaining with Cranks. Got up to check. My two are the 1980s original and a bit later (after David Canter died) for the Entertaining.

Yes I second Sarah Brown's cashew and mushroom recipe - a great favourite

And this Cranks carrot cake recipe is one I'm always asked for even now

And from Rose Elliot

This is a really old school nut roast which I love though I leave out the lentils and stock https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/nut-loaf If anyone's in East Anglia I can recommend Amandines in Diss and Hullabaloo in Ipswich, both good old fashioned veggie/vegan food with no fake meat in sight.

I love this stuff. Made a curry recently that my husband described as “the sort of food you’d get for free from the Hare Krishnas” 😂

I couldn’t see the method in that Homity Pie recipe linked, only the ingredients. Apologies if I’ve missed it

Here you go!

@Xiaoxiong please share the recipe! Preferably with a photo of how it turns out tonight :-)

Oh my, am feeling massively nostalgic with this thread! Thanks Op!

Went veggie in the early eighties, we got recipes from the Vegetarian Society at that point, as we didn't know any real live vegetarians!

There was a veggy cafe that did fabulous salads, so managed between the two! Also majored on quiches and cauli cheese and ratatouille (with home made brown rice) all from MnS.

Then in my gap year, I actually worked in Cranks! One of my colleagues decamped to Food for Thought. I was definitely involved in the production of Armenian soup and the cress stuffed cheesy rolls (bit of technique required there). Remember washing loads of lentils and carefully checking for stones! The macro(biotic) rice was very tasty. Tigermilk! Fruit salad in soured cream and cinnamon. Yehudi Menuhin used to come in, as did Leo Sayer!

The cakes were lovely too. No idea where my Cranks recipe book went.... I remember also a wholefood vegetarian book that my aunt got from Sainsbury's. We went to her colleagues house one time and had grilled grapefruit, which seemed very decadent!
Stuffed mushrooms as a student and shed loads of pasta....

I feel so hungry now! Fortunately have got an adzuki bean bake that just needs to be warmed up.
Also just remembered a lovely restaurant called Harvest in Richmond.
Had my first banoffe pie there. Savoury veggie pancakes, were a thing then too!

There were a couple of veggie versions of imam bayeldi (stuffed aubergine) which I thought was the height of cool 😎

I made vegetable cobbler tonight. No recipe it's just a vegetable stew topped with cheese scones. Lovely!

I will say that old-school veggie food is not necessarily the most photogenic....

But it was comforting! And reasonable! And very forgiving - it calls for 450g spinach but I only had 250g, so made up the rest with the ends of a few bags of mixed leaves, random herbs and some rocket. It also called for 115g grated fontina cheese which I made up with all sorts of odds and ends of cheeses in the fridge, plus an extra egg I had knocking about, and it worked really well.

Served with 4 cotton woolly supermarket tomatoes, cut in quarters, sautéed in butter and olive oil and then pan deglazed with vinegar.

Enough for a family of 4 with grapes and yoghurt as dessert.

Delia Smith's vegetarian book is worth a look.

I will say that old-school veggie food is not necessarily the most photogenic....

Possibly not, especially in an age obsessed with how food looks in photos, rather than how it smells and tastes. The Cranks recipes, to which I provided a link above, mostly use an image of a key ingredient for the thumbnail or a clearly professionally produced version of the finished dish, but for some reason this photo of the parsnip, apple and cashew nut burger has been put in. I'm sure it tastes great ...