Vegan MoFo day 19 - A ploughman's lunch on the go

The original lunch on the go was probably the ploughman's lunch.

According to the conventional wisdom, the ploughman's lunch - also known as the ploughboy's lunch - was a chunk of cheese, bread, and maybe an apple or some pickles. It was the sort of meal you could wrap up in a bit of cloth, and take with you into the fields, lay down your plough in the middle of the day and tuck in.

It's an image that harks back to a bucolic image of England, with ruddy faced farm boys knotting kerchiefs around their necks, and stalks of wheat waving under a wide blue sky.

Whether that was the case, no-one's quite sure. According to What Caesar Did for my Salad, the first mention of the ploughman's lunch was in the Life of Walter Scott, a book published around 180 years ago.

But the ploughman's, as it's mostly now known, reached its zenith in the 20th century when a campaign by (depending on who you listen to) either the Milk Marketing Board or the English Country Cheese Council to popularise the consumption of cheese after rationing ended post-World War II.

Those milk-pushers evidently did a great job - the ploughman's was a staple of pub menus throughout the 1970s and 80s, where it became a dish of cheese, bread, pickles, chutney and salady bits of your choice.

Somewhere since then, the dish has rather fallen out of favour. The idea of recreating a vegan version was pretty much as an excuse so that I could order some cheese from Tyne Chease, pretty much the only ready-made nut cheese seller in the UK.

In my humble opinion, good nut cheese should be handed out to new vegans on the day of their conversion, to convince them there is life after milk, and Tyne Chease would be right up there for inclusion in the party bag. At £10 a cheese, it's sadly not cheap, but it is delicious - wonderfully sharp and complex.

I recreated the ploughman's with homemade carrot and cumin chutney, pickled onions, celery, tomatoes, bread and slice of Tyne Chease's garlic and herb flavour.

Friends, I now see why the ploughman's was so popular - there's something so calm, so comforting, so wholesome about eating good cheese and bread, alternating bites with spiky pickles or cleansing celery. Laying it out on a board, it puts me in mind of one of those beautiful Dutch still lifes from the 17th century - edible masterpieces.

Next time the Non-dairy Milk Marketing Board or the English Country Vegan Cheese Council want a recipe to get the world chowing down on nut cheese, I've got just the ticket.