London Particular soup recipe: Vegan MoFo

The next English dish was a completely new one on me, but one I stumbled on when I was trying to work out how best to cook gammon (or in this case, the vegan equivalent: Redwoods' gammon style roast).

Its origins are in the 19th century apparently, when London was subject to thick smogs (it helps if you picture any 1950s film based on a Dickens or Sherlock Holmes novel here - doughty gentlemen in tweed turning their collars up against the weather, and fighting their way through fog-blanketed streets with nothing but a stout cane for company.)

These pollution-filled fogs were known as 'pea soupers' at the time. Another name for them then was London particulars - a name that was then passed on to a thick dish of pea and ham soup. Clever huh?

Without even researching anything, it's the sort of dish that has the social history behind it writ large.

Originally, it was a mixture of cheap vegetables, split peas and the stock you boiled your gammon in - the sort of thing you made because it was cheap, simple, nutritious and kept a large family going for a long time.

It's largely the same ingredients as the pease pudding and roast vegan gammon dish I made earlier for MoFo, rearranged.

To start with, fry off an onion, a rib of celery, and a carrot until soft. Add in a bowlful of pease pudding. (If you've got some non-blended up split peas, so much the better - keep a ladleful to one side.) Add some vegetable stock til you get your desired consistency. Add some chopped up vegan gammon roast (you can blend the soup or have chunks of the roast doing their own thing) and some celery leaves or parsley. And that's it.

It's the sort of soup that should really be eaten in winter, near an open fire or under a blanket, flicking two fingers at the cold.

Serve with crusty bread and the heating on.