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Leeks, Welsh Porridge
Boil the required number of leeks for five minutes, drain them off, and then stew them gently in some fresh water, with a little salt and pepper. When tender, cut them into slices, and serve in some of the liquor in which they were stewed, with toast cut into strips.
A plain leek broth of the sort that filled out a nineteenth-century supper table. The recipe assumes you know how to clean a leek, and it gives no quantities at all, so a few decisions are left to the cook.
- Grit firstThe instruction that matters most is one the book omits: leeks trap soil between their layers. Split them lengthways and rinse under running water before the first boil, or the finished broth will be sandy and no amount of stewing will fix it.
- Why two watersThe five-minute boil and drain is probably there to take the harsher edge off the leeks, the same logic behind blanching onions; the book gives no reason. Keep it — it makes for a milder broth.
- Timing the stew"When tender" means roughly 15 to 20 minutes at a bare simmer for leeks left in lengths, less if they are young and thin. Test the thickest part of the white with a knife tip.
- The liquorWater, salt and pepper gives a very thin broth by modern standards. Cooking the leeks in light chicken or vegetable stock, or finishing with a knob of butter stirred in off the heat, is within the spirit of the dish and makes it worth eating on its own.
- QuantitiesAllow two medium leeks per person as a first course, and enough water to keep them just covered. The original leaves both entirely to the cook.
- The toastCut into narrow strips or fingers. The recipe does not say whether they go into the bowl or alongside; served alongside they stay crisp.
The leek is often said to be the oldest of Welsh emblems, worn on St David's Day and mentioned by Shakespeare in Henry V, and Welsh cookery has long treated it as a staple rather than a garnish — most familiarly in cawl, the leek-and-mutton broth of the farmhouse kitchen. "Porridge" here carries its older, wider English sense of any thick soup or pottage rather than anything made from oats, a usage that was already becoming old-fashioned when Cassell's was compiled in the late nineteenth century. The dish exists to demonstrate a method — blanch, then stew gently in fresh water — on a vegetable that was cheap and available all winter.