Hello friends, today I am revisiting a book I first wrote about in 2012 – The Australian Vegetable Cookbook. I am taste-testing two recipes from that book – a Cornish Leek Pie and a Roquefort Wedge Salad. The book contains a lovely line drawing and a brief history of each vegetable. So, without further preamble let’s get to the recipes!

Cornish Leek Pie

I was dubious as to how authentic the Cornish Leek Pie would be.  However, I found a few references to a Leeky / Likky Pie which dates from 1865 and is remarkably similar!

I layered boiled leeks and bacon into a pie dish and covered with pastry.  Now, I made a mistake here as the recipe quite clearly says to season the layers with salt and pepper.  I thought the bacon would be salty enough which turned out to be true so I didn’t add salt.  But I totally forgot about the pepper.  But by the time I remembered the pepper, the pie was already in the oven. 

Then, the recipe itself got weird.  After cooking for a while, I needed to make a hole in the pastry top and pour in a mixture of cream and parsley. I have never added ingredients to a pie in this way before!  But it did allow me to add the missing pepper in with the cream and parsley.   I thought it would be really hard to cut a hole in the pastry once it was baked so I did this before it went into the oven.  

The recipe which I have linked above adds eggs and cream to the bacon and leek mix which I think would be a lot more sensible.  This would have thickened up on cooking to form a quiche-like filling.  As it was the cream did nothing except make everything a bit wet! It also kept bubbling up out of the hole in the pastry and made a bit of a mess. 

There was nothing wrong with the cornish leek pie.  It was just not something I would make, in the format given in the Australian Vegetable Cookbook.  Full marks for the illustrations though!  They are beautiful!  

Cornish Leek Pie – The Recipe

Roquefort Lettuce Wedges

The night after I made the Cornish Leek Pie I made the Roquefort Lettuce Wedge from the same book. 

The roquefort dressing was sooo good!  But overall this dish lacked something.  I served it on a gorgeous plate I bought when I was in Darwin earlier this year to try to fancy it up a bit.  Plate 10/10.  Dish…kind of meh…I would defintely make this again,  However, I would add some bacon or croutons or some chives to the salad (or all three) just to make it a bit more interesting!

They say you can’t step in the same river twice and, to be honest I was disappointed with my revisiting of The Australian Vegetable Cookbook.  There was nothing wrong with either recipe but they were also not amazing.  One or two more ingredients to each one might have brought a bit more flavour or texture or just some va va voom to the dish.  

Whether this was due to bad recipe choices on my behalf or a comment on the state of vegetable dishes in the 1970s remains to be determined.  There are still a number of recipes I have flagged as “to be cooked”. so I may well have another crack at it in the future.  Just not for a little while!

Roquefort Lettuce Wedge – The Recipe

I hope your cooking adventures this week fare a little better!  Have a great week!