My first vegan dinner party was challenging, but not a disaster

Several months ago I posted a review of two vegan restaurants in London. While I enjoyed both places, I pointed out that vegan options seem to be most in tune with Asian and Oriental cuisines that are already heavy on vegetables and default to lavish spicing for depth of flavour. People with more traditional palates who are fans of subtlety, richness, and creamy finishes would find things more difficult.

That’s precisely the challenge I decided to accept when I hosted my first vegan dinner party. I could have gone down the spicy Asian route, and that’s where most cookbooks wanted to take me. But my husband would be at the table along with our vegan friends, and I wanted him to have some chance of enjoyment. So we’d be tomato free, because of his allergy, and I’d get as close to traditional European as I could.  

My menu was more of a hotch-potch than my usual carefully themed dinner party, with flavours and influences coming from all over the place … but I was basically happy with the results. My guests said they were delighted. They’re too polite to have said anything else, but clean plates and the amount they packed away suggested authenticity. Even the husband was satisfied.

So, the menu went like this…

I laid out three amuse bouche for people to nibble on while I was cooking. First, a jar of home-pickled okra. This was one of the great revelations of my short stint in Texas, and if you’ve never had this vegetable pickled you’re missing a treat. While mine have never quite matched the glory of the Talk of Texas brand (naturally unavailable in the UK), it’s fairly easy to get good results by jamming a bunch of clean, fresh okra in a big Kilner jar with some garlic and some spicy peppers, topping up with hot pickling liquid and letting them sit for a week. Next, I put my set of restaurant-style tasting spoons to use and piled a little dollop of barley, roasted squash and roasted red onion salad on each. These were both already prepped in the fridge, so low effort. 

My third snack required a little more, but was essentially a bit of refrigerator clean-out. The last of the Christmas Brussels sprouts, quartered, stir-fried, served on top of a bit of vegan soured cream (it’s not bad), on top of a fried disk of potato with grated chestnut to finish it all off. I missed the lardons that usually spike our Brussels. The pork gives them far more depth of flavour and balances their bitterness, but this wasn’t bad.

Embracing the spirit of dry January, I paired all of this with a mocktail made up of Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla 0%, Martini and Rossi alcohol-free Vibrante, a bit of orange juice, a trace of pomegranate syrup and a good whack of lime juice, topped up with diet tonic water. I’m still playing with proportions … my first round was a bit sweet and the orange juice may not be needed at all … but this is an option I’ll happily drink even in less austere months.

My starter was the best dish of the meal, IMHO. There are a great many recipes for roast celeriac with a white bean purée … a particularly good dish for Weight Watchers as the only thing “pointed” is olive oil and some tahini. In my version, I started with a whole, raw celeriac cleaned and then slathered with plenty of olive oil liberally mixed with herbs de Provence, salt and pepper. Lots of recipes go down spicier, more Asian routes but that was off brief. The celeriac goes into a Dutch oven with its lid on and then sits at low heat (about 150C) for at least three hours. I popped the lid off every 40 minutes or so to roll the root around in the oil and herbs and turn it. At the end, you should have something that’s brown, sticky and caramelised on the outside and soft to a knife thrust inside. The purée is simply a tin of butter beans (any white bean will do; the flavours vary slightly with your choice), a heaping tablespoon of tahini, olive oil and some of the water from the bean can. All mixed until you get it to the taste and consistency you prefer. Then it was as simple as a schmear of purée on each plate, topped by a quarter of the celeriac and some finely chopped flat leaved parsley.

Given the newness of everything I was trying, I went for a personal safe space of home made pasta for the main. I stuffed my agnolotti with a mix of mushrooms, including re-hydrated morels and black trumpets. I wouldn’t be mixing in the usual ricotta, so I thought I’d better up the stakes on the fungi flavour. That worked. Normally, I’d do the pasta with a simple brown butter and sage sauce, spiking it with some hazelnuts before scattering Parmesan across the top. With butter and cheese off my options list, I defaulted to another safe space and did a simple fresh tomato sauce. 

I topped things with more of that vegan soured cream instead of Parmesan. While my guests proclaimed their delight, I wasn’t happy. The sweetness and acidity of the tomato overwhelmed the forest floor flavours the dish should have had. I was looking with envy at my husband’s substitute cheese sauce. I should have been brave and tried vegan butter with my usual recipe. 

Rationalising that alcohol if burned off didn’t break dry January rules, dessert was grilled pineapple in a flambéed rum sauce with coconut granita. OK, not quite flambéed. I didn’t move fast enough and there wasn’t enough alcohol left to ignite by the time I got the lighter out. But it was tasty. And would have been even better had I remembered to crush and toast the macadamia nut topping before serving. 

The granita is wonderfully simple. Tinned coconut milk mixed with a bit of sugar syrup, poured into a freezer container, kept soft by a fork running through it every half hour. Two warnings here: do NOT miss any of those forkings or you’ll get the texture all wrong, and plan for at least four hours in the freezer. (The rapidly-melting scoops in the photo only had three.) It’s also best to only make what you’re going to eat, because once you stop that bi-hourly agitation you end up with a big coconut ice cube.

The finisher was, admittedly, more Caribbean than European, but I’m satisfied I ended up with a menu that stayed safely on our more familiar side of the planet.

Vegan is never going to be my go-to option for entertaining. But in a world where more people are embracing the option, I don’t want to have to exclude friends just because they can’t eat what I’m cooking. And culinary experimentation is always a good thing. That celeriac starter is good enough to go into the Bencard dinner party rotation. It will be even better when followed by a succulent bit of pork belly.