Burnt leeks with polenta and romesco sauce — a Rowley Leigh recipe

Up here, 1,000 feet above sea level on the edge of Exmoor, spring comes late. The wild garlic has just started, and the daffodils are on the verge of flowering. My vegetable plot is mostly tumbleweed but for a few artichoke and cardoon plants, a fine bed of broad beans and a few leeks.

These leeks are not tall or particularly fat and the white part is barely three inches long. They look like overgrown spring onions. They would not gather any rosettes in the gardening show and they have taken an inordinate amount of time to reach their putative maturity. For all that, I am rather proud of them.

Aside from St David’s Day, Britain’s celebration of leeks is somewhat muted: in Catalonia, calçot — something akin to massive spring onions — are finished already but not before orgiastic “calçotada” festivals have taken place all over the region. Calçots are burnt black on the open fire, wrapped in newspaper to sweat for a while and then consumed by sucking out the sweet interior, dipping the exterior in large quantities of a spicy romesco-like sauce and drinking even larger quantities of red wine.

Besides the mess and the copious quantities of wine, the romesco sauce might have something to do with the excitement around calçot season. Another reason is that the scallions have taken a while to get there. The seed onions are planted in the autumn. Once they start to sprout at Christmas time they are lifted, transplanted to bigger beds and then lifted again in the summer and stored in a dry barn for a couple of months. Then they’re trimmed and replanted in trenches. As they start to shoot, earth is piled up around the tips to blanch them. They are finally ready to harvest in January or February. The process rivals sea kale or radicchio tardivo for laboriousness and complexity. I might stick to my leeks.

Burnt leeks with polenta and romesco sauce

Serves six

Fat spring onions would make a fair substitute. As for the romesco, there are as many recipes as there are Catalans and certainly almonds are more commonly used than hazelnuts. A mixture of both is good.

For the romesco sauce:

1. Scorch the tomatoes and chillies on a hot grill or griddle plate until blackened and soft. Peel the garlic and pound in a mortar with a teaspoon of salt to form a paste before adding the hazelnuts and pounding in turn, again to a paste.

2. Remove the scorched skin from the tomatoes and chillies. Cut the tomatoes in half and squeeze out the seeds and pulp before chopping the flesh and adding to the mortar. Open out the chillies to remove the seeds, chop these and add to the mortar also, along with the fried bread. Continue to pound this mush before adding the vinegar and then the olive oil, mixing well to make a homogenous sauce.

3. For the leeks, trim the ends and split them down the middle, leaving most of the whites intact. Stand in a jug of running water for a few minutes and then check to see they are clean inside. Dry well, rub with a little olive oil, salt well and then place on a moderately hot grill or griddle plate. Cook for at least 20 minutes: they should be gently scorched and soft and tender within. Let them rest in a warm oven.

4. To make the polenta, bring a pot containing half a litre of well-salted water to the boil. Pour in the polenta in a steady stream, whisking hard as you go. Lower the heat and keep stirring the polenta with a wooden spoon with your arm well protected in a cloth as it is liable to bubble and spit. Cook for around 10 minutes — unless using the coarse “bramata” polenta which will take twice as long — and dilute with a little more water if it is getting too thick. Stir in the butter and the cheese, taste for seasoning and serve a pile of polenta on the plate with the leeks on top and a generous blob of the romesco sauce alongside.

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