Jimi Famurewa’s recipe for Marmite and leek homity pie

A vegetarian classic that’s a bit like a bubbling, rustic, cheesy quiche

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).