Jimi Famurewa’s recipe for Marmite and leek homity pie

3 hours ago 5

The first time I encountered homity pie was in a disused train carriage. It was Deptford market in the late 2000s: a reliably chaotic, noisy morass of jostling bodies, the wafted smell of sweating burger onions and a vast section where the “stalls” generally comprised gatherings of orphaned trainers, boxy VHS players and other random house-clearance items dumped on to lengths of tarpaulin. I was an eager but gastronomically green 25-year-old in my first proper flatshare and this ragtag locus of trade became an early site of core dining memories. I thoughtfully appraised very ordinary vegetables, channelling Rick Stein in Gascony; bought warm, hectically seeded granary loaves from the Percy Ingle bakery; ate average pub Thai, better kerbside rotisserie chicken; and generally tried, with limited success, to ignore the creeping sense that I had settled in a part of town that wanted for some structure or culinary vitality.

It was this atmosphere of cultural nascence into which the Deptford Project trundled. Predominantly housed on a former railway yard in the midst of redevelopment, this cafe, cultural hub and outdoor cinema was located around a decommissioned 1960s commuter train, boldly redecorated and reimagined by designer Morag Myerscough: a becalmed, brightly daubed piece of rolling stock that, between 2008 and 2014, jutted out into the high street like a glitch in the urban matrix. Though it sounds, I know, like an unforgivable cliche of “gritty” hipsterdom, the Deptford Project had a ramshackle edge, a palpable community ethos, genuinely affordable prices and a charming streak of weirdness (the toilet, if memory serves, was an eternally freezing garden shed turned into a shrine to Elvis).

I do not remember a great deal about the menu of homemade cakes, sandwiches and brunch plates purportedly featuring eggs laid by the cafe’s own free-range hens. But what I do remember is the homity pie: a hulking great wedge of pastry with a crumbly, butter-rich shortness, generously filled with soft hunks of potato suspended in a set, sweetly lactic cheese and leek sauce. Homity was, to my vegetarian option-averse sensibilities, a total revelation; quiche mistranslated by a rugged, carb-addicted farmhand. And while it has a certain homespun, cosy-jumpered old-fashionedness – boosted by its association with the Devon land girls who supposedly invented it, as well as Cranks, the pioneering vegetarian restaurant chain that popularised it – I think an umami-boosting lick of Marmite turns it into an intensely soothing, early winter warmer, and repository for new-season leeks.

Serve with winter tomatoes or sharply dressed salad leaves. Above all, savour the fact that this expression of thrifty, comfort-forward resourcefulness works just as well in a contemporary home kitchen as it did in a train carriage cafe in credit-crunched, transitional Deptford.

Marmite and leek homity pie

Serves 6

320g sheet shortcrust pastry (shop-bought is fine)
20g unsalted butter
Olive oil
1 medium onion, peeled and chopped
1 leek, washed, trimmed and finely sliced
Salt and black pepper
2 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
600g floury potatoes, peeled and quartered
100g baby spinach leaves
2 spring onions, trimmed and finely chopped
1 tsp grated nutmeg
1 tsp English mustard
1 heaped tbsp Marmite
200g grated hard cheese (mature cheddar, gruyere or, even better, a mixture of the two)
150ml double cream

Begin by rolling out the pastry so that it can be pressed into the base of a 20cm springform tin or greased pie dish, with any excess trimmed off and saved for another use. Heat the butter and a generous glug of olive oil in a wide, heavy-bottomed saucepan or wok. Add the chopped onion and leek, and season thoroughly, before frying over a low to medium heat for 10 minutes, or until softened. Add the garlic and cook for a further five minutes.

Meanwhile, boil the potatoes in salted water for about 10 minutes, until tender, then drain and add to the softened onion mix. Fold in the spinach leaves, spring onions, nutmeg, mustard, Marmite, 150g of the grated cheese and the double cream. Stir thoroughly to combine.

Pour the cheese-and-potato mixture into the pastry-lined dish, level, then grate the remaining 50g cheese on top. Bake in the middle of a 200C (180C fan)/390F/gas 6 oven for 40 minutes, until golden and bubbling. Leave the pie to cool and set for at least 20 minutes, then turn out on to a plate and slice into thick wedges.