Allium ampeloprasum, a species genuinely distinct from the onion, in the cultivated form usually written as A. ampeloprasum var. porrum or the Porrum Group. The same species also produces the Egyptian kurrat (var. kurrat), elephant garlic (var. ampeloprasum), and the true pearl onion (var. sectivum).
Of the alliums in this atlas the leek is the one that most clearly earns a separate entry, because it is a separate species rather than a cultivar group. Allium ampeloprasum grows wild around the Mediterranean rim and across Southwest Asia, and it was pulled into cultivation independently of A. cepa, from which it differs in the most basic respect of all: it does not make a bulb worth eating, and nobody has ever asked it to.
What was selected instead was the shank, the tight cylinder formed by the overlapping bases of the leaves. Growers lengthen and whiten it by blanching, banking soil up around the stem as it grows so that the lower portion never sees light and never turns green and fibrous. That is why leeks arrive with grit driven deep between their layers and must be split lengthways and rinsed under running water rather than merely wiped, and it is the same operation Catalan growers perform on the calçot, arrived at independently on a different species.
The species has proved unusually willing to be pulled in several directions at once, and three of its other forms are worth naming because they are routinely mistaken for other plants. The Egyptian kurrat makes almost no shank and is cut repeatedly for its leaves, like a herb. Elephant garlic is not a garlic at all but this same species forming one large mild clove. And the true pearl onion is A. ampeloprasum var. sectivum, not a miniature A. cepa, although most of what is sold under the name commercially is in fact the latter.
The leek's route is the plainest in this family and it runs almost entirely along one axis. Out of the eastern Mediterranean it went east into Mesopotamia, where it appears as karashu in the Yale Babylonian tablets of about 1750 BCE, the oldest written recipes known anywhere, and south into Egypt, where the species was selected into the leaf crop that Egyptians still eat.
From Egypt it crossed to Greece, where prason gave every European name for the vegetable that Latin did not, and from Greece to Rome, where porrum gave the rest. Rome carried it north into Gaul and across the Channel into Britain, and the two Celtic countries at the far end of that road, Wales and Scotland, made more of it than Italy ever did. The cool, wet, heavily worked ground of Picardy, Flanders, and the Netherlands turned out to suit it better than anywhere else in Europe, and it became a staple there.
The eastward line ran again through Byzantium into Ottoman Istanbul and across the Danube into the Romanian principalities, carrying the olive-oil vegetable tradition with it. Its last significant journey was made in a single lifetime: a French chef took his mother's leek and potato soup to a Manhattan hotel roof in 1917, chilled it, and gave the vegetable its most famous dish.
The leek belongs to winter and to the cold-climate kitchens of Europe, where it stands in the ground through the months when little else does. Wales has made it a national emblem, Scotland built its oldest named soup on it, France treats it as the asparagus of the poor and means that as a compliment, and Romania eats more of it per head than almost any other country. Turkey and Greece cook it slowly in olive oil and eat it cold; Belgium and the Netherlands leave it in substantial pieces as a vegetable rather than cooking it out as an aromatic.
It is also the allium least often confused with its relatives, with two exceptions worth stating. North American wild leek is Allium tricoccum, the ramp, a different species entirely and unrelated to this one. Chinese leek, as the term is used in English-language recipes, is usually Allium tuberosum, the garlic chive, which is different again. Neither belongs to A. ampeloprasum, and neither behaves like a leek in the pan.
Historical Journey of Leek
The Levant & the Eastern Mediterranean — c. 3000 BCE
The leek is the one member of this family that is genuinely a different plant. Allium ampeloprasum is not Allium cepa: it is a separate species, with its own wild populations scattered around the Mediterranean rim and across Southwest Asia, and everything the onion entry says about bulbs is beside the point here.
What the wild plant offers is a loose, rangy allium with a small bulb and long flat leaves, and what cultivation did to it was to abandon the bulb altogether and select for the shank: the tight cylinder of overlapping leaf bases that a leek is eaten for. The species turned out to be unusually obliging in this respect, and it has been pulled in several directions at once. Alongside the leek proper it has given the kurrat of Egypt, grown for its leaves and cut repeatedly like a herb; elephant garlic, which is not a garlic at all but this same species forming a large mild clove; and the true pearl onion, which is likewise A. ampeloprasum rather than a small onion.
The one technique the leek cannot do without is blanching. Soil is banked up around the growing shank so that the lower portion never sees light, stays white, and remains tender instead of turning green and fibrous. That is the same operation Catalonia performs on the calçot, arrived at independently on a different species, and it is why a leek is sold with earth in its layers and must be split and washed with more care than any other vegetable in the box.
This point stands for the wild plant and the routes out of it. No single surviving Levantine dish anchors it; what the region transmitted was the crop itself, east into Mesopotamia and south into Egypt.
Ur, Babylon & Sumer — c. 2500 BCE
Mesopotamia gives the leek its earliest secure culinary record, and it is a remarkably direct one. The Yale Babylonian tablets, three clay tablets carrying some three dozen recipes written in Akkadian around 1750 BCE and the oldest recipes known anywhere, call repeatedly for karashu, leek, usually alongside garlic and onion, pounded together and stirred into the broths and stews that make up most of the collection. These are not lists of ingredients but working instructions, and the leek appears in them as a matter of routine rather than as a luxury.
Sumerian garden records point the same way. Leeks were grown in the irrigated plots of the temple estates, they were issued in rations, and the administrative texts count them by the bundle. The plant suited the conditions: it is hardy, it tolerates heavy soil, and it stands in the ground through the cool season when little else is available.
The modern dishes of the region preserve the habit. The Mesopotamian stews reconstructed in this atlas, of lamb with onion, of chickpeas, of cumin, and the garlic lamb, all take leek in quantity as part of their aromatic base, which is exactly how the tablets use it. It is one of the few places on any of these maps where an ancient written recipe and a living technique line up so plainly.
The Nile Delta, Egypt — c. 2000 BCE
Egypt took the species in a different direction and kept it there. What grows along the Nile is the kurrat, Allium ampeloprasum var. kurrat, which forms almost no shank at all and is grown instead for its narrow dark leaves, cut close to the ground and allowed to regrow several times in a season. It is treated as a herb rather than a vegetable, chopped raw into salads, scattered over ful, and eaten as part of the plate of raw greens that accompanies a meal.
Leeks are amongst the foods the Israelites are described as missing from Egypt in Numbers 11:5, listed with cucumbers, melons, onions, and garlic, which is a fair index of how ordinary they were. They appear in tomb paintings and in the offering lists, and desiccated remains have been recovered from burials.
This point carries no recipe and is not flagged as a staple, which is a deliberate reading rather than an omission. The kurrat is a living crop with a living use, but that use is as an undifferentiated raw green amongst others rather than as the defining element of any dish this atlas could name honestly. What Egypt did transmit was the plant and the habit, north across the Mediterranean into the Greek world, where the shank rather than the leaf became the thing worth growing.
Athens & the Aegean — c. 400 BCE
Greek prason is the ancestor of every European name for the vegetable that does not descend from the Latin, and Greek cooking has never let it go. Theophrastus distinguishes the kinds in his botanical works, separating the headed leek grown for its shank from the cut leek grown for its leaves, which is the earliest clear statement that the species had already been pulled two ways.
What Greece does with it now belongs to the winter, when the leek is at its sweetest and most of the summer vegetables are gone. Prasopita is the leek pie, filo layered over leeks sweated slowly in olive oil with feta, one of the family of savoury pies that runs through the whole Greek repertoire. Prasorizo is the plainer thing and arguably the better one: leeks cooked down with rice and olive oil into something between a pilaf and a stew, eaten warm or at room temperature, and standard fasting food during the long Orthodox Lenten periods when neither meat nor dairy is permitted.
That fasting calendar is a real force in Greek cooking rather than an incidental one. Something close to half the year is meat-free for the observant, and the ladera, the dishes cooked in olive oil, exist to fill it. The leek suits the role because it carries sweetness and body without any animal fat at all.
Rome & the Roman Empire — c. 60 CE
Latin porrum gave the leek its name across half of Europe, and Rome gave it its most celebrated enthusiast. The emperor Nero is recorded by Pliny and by Suetonius as eating leeks in oil on fixed days of the month in the belief that they cleared and strengthened the voice, a habit that earned him the nickname Porrophagus, the leek-eater. Whether it did anything for his singing is not recorded with the same confidence.
Beneath the anecdote is a serious agricultural interest. Columella devotes attention to leek cultivation and distinguishes the porrum capitatum, the headed leek grown for the shank, from the porrum sectivum, the cut leek harvested for its leaves, which is the same division Theophrastus had drawn in Greek and which survives today in the leek and the kurrat. Apicius uses leeks freely, and the Roman kitchen treated them as an everyday vegetable rather than a garnish.
Rome then did what Rome did with a great many things: carried it north. The legions and the villa gardens took the leek into Gaul and across the Channel into Britain, where the climate suited it better than it suited most Mediterranean crops and where two nations would eventually make far more of it than Italy ever did.
Modern Italy grows and eats leeks without any particular ceremony, gratinated with cheese and cream in the north, folded into soups and risotti, but the vegetable belongs to the everyday rather than to the national repertoire.
Cardiff & Wales — c. 640 CE
No vegetable anywhere is more completely bound to a nation than the leek is to Wales, and the binding is old enough that its origins are properly obscure.
The story usually told has Saint David instructing Welsh soldiers to wear leeks in their caps before a battle against the Saxons, traditionally placed around 640 and traditionally fought in a leek field, so that they could tell one another apart. The account is late and almost certainly a retrospective explanation, but the practice it explains is genuine and continuous: leeks are worn on Saint David's Day, the first of March, and the Welsh Guards still wear the leek as their regimental emblem and eat one raw on parade. Shakespeare knew the custom well enough to build a scene on it, when Fluellen forces Pistol to eat a leek in Henry V.
The Welsh word explains the country's second emblem as well. Cenhinen is a leek; cenhinen Pedr, Peter's leek, is a daffodil. The two names are close enough that the flower drifted into the role of national symbol during the nineteenth century, being rather more decorative and considerably less pungent in a buttonhole, and Wales has carried both ever since.
In the kitchen the leek anchors the national dish. Cawl is the slow broth of lamb or bacon with root vegetables and leeks that is the oldest continuous thing in Welsh cooking, and Glamorgan sausages, the meatless sausages of Caerphilly cheese, breadcrumbs, and leek, are its best-known counterpart.
Paris & Picardy, France — c. 1300 CE
The French call the leek l'asperge du pauvre, the asparagus of the poor, and the phrase carries less condescension than it appears to. What it records is that a vegetable available cheaply through the whole of winter can be treated with the same seriousness as one that is expensive and briefly in season, and French cooking treats it so.
Poireaux vinaigrette is the demonstration. Whole leeks are poached until entirely tender, pressed to drive out the water, dressed warm in a sharp mustard vinaigrette, and served cold as a first course. It is on the menu of every bistrot in the country and it is a straightforward test of technique, because a leek that is undercooked squeaks and one that is overcooked slumps into threads.
The leek also holds a structural position in the French kitchen that no other vegetable occupies. It is in the bouquet garni, its green leaves used as the wrapper; it is one of the vegetables of the pot-au-feu; and it is half of the potage parmentier, the leek and potato soup that is the foundation of French domestic cookery and the direct parent of vichyssoise.
Picardy and the north grow the most and eat the most. Flamiche aux poireaux, the open leek tart of the Somme, is the regional dish, and the name comes from the Flemish for a flat cake, which places it firmly in the belt of country running across the border into Belgium where the leek has always mattered most.
Edinburgh & Scotland — c. 1500 CE
Scotland's leek dish is one of the oldest named soups in the British Isles, and the argument it generates is about fruit.
Cock-a-leekie is a boiling fowl simmered at length with a very large quantity of leeks, the bird eventually falling apart into the broth. It appears in Scottish records from the sixteenth century, it is the traditional opening course of a Burns Supper and of Hogmanay, and the disputed element is the prunes. One camp holds that prunes are essential, that the sweetness against the salt and the allium is the whole character of the dish, and that leaving them out produces mere chicken and leek soup. The other regards them as a medieval survival that should have been retired. Both positions are held with conviction and the prunes are, on balance, correct.
The leeks go in twice, which is the technique worth carrying away. A first batch is added at the start and cooks to nothing, giving the broth its body and sweetness; a second is added near the end and stays in recognisable pieces. It is the same split treatment the Nordic kitchen applies to dill and the Polish kitchen to soured cream, arrived at independently for the same reason.
The vegetable runs through the rest of the Scottish repertoire in a quieter way, into the mashed potato and cabbage of rumbledethumps and into the broths that are the backbone of the country's cooking.
Istanbul & the Ottoman Empire — c. 1550 CE
Two traditions meet on the leek in Ottoman Istanbul, and both are still cooking.
The Turkish one is zeytinyağlı pırasa, leeks braised in olive oil with rice, carrot, lemon, and a little sugar, cooked until entirely soft and then cooled and eaten at room temperature. It belongs to the zeytinyağlılar, the olive oil dishes, which are a distinct category of the Turkish repertoire rather than a way of describing them: vegetables cooked slowly in oil, always served cold or barely warm, and never with meat. The leek is one of the best subjects for it because long cooking turns it silky rather than watery.
The Sephardi one arrived with the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 and taken in by the Ottoman Empire, and it made the leek a festival food. Keftes de prasa are patties of boiled, squeezed, and chopped leek bound with egg and matzo meal or breadcrumbs and fried, eaten at Rosh Hashanah and at Passover. Their place at the new year table is a piece of wordplay: the Aramaic for leek, karti, resembles the verb to cut off, and the leek is therefore one of the simanim, the symbolic foods, eaten with a wish that those who wish the diner harm be cut off. Ladino-speaking communities across Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans carried the dish, and it travelled with them again to Israel and the Americas in the twentieth century.
Ghent, Flanders & the Low Countries — c. 1600 CE
The belt of cool, wet, heavily manured country running from Picardy through Flanders into the Netherlands is where the leek grows best in Europe, and it shows in the cooking.
Waterzooi is the Ghent dish, and its name means something close to watery mess, which undersells it considerably. Chicken or freshwater fish is poached gently with leeks, carrots, and celeriac cut into fine strips, and the broth is then enriched with egg yolk and cream into something between a soup and a stew. The leek is the dominant vegetable and the one that survives the finishing: the others contribute sweetness and disappear, whilst the leek holds its shape and its texture in the cream.
The Dutch use is plainer and more constant. Leeks go into erwtensoep, the split pea soup thick enough that a spoon is supposed to stand in it, which is winter food and skating food and is eaten across the country from the moment the weather turns.
What both share is a treatment that would be foreign further south. The leek here is not an aromatic to be cooked out at the beginning of a dish; it is a vegetable in its own right, cut into substantial pieces and left recognisable on the plate.
Bucharest & Oltenia, Romania — c. 1700 CE
Romania eats more leeks per head than almost anywhere else in Europe, and Oltenia in the south-west is the region that grows and eats the most of them. The vegetable is close to a regional identity there, and Oltenians are teased about it across the rest of the country in much the way the Welsh are.
Praz cu măsline is the dish that explains why. Leeks are cut into lengths and stewed slowly with tomato and olives until they collapse into something dark, sweet, and sour at once. It is a fasting dish, cooked in oil with no animal fat, which matters in an Orthodox country with a long calendar of fast days, and it appears on the table through the whole of winter.
The route by which the leek reached this level of importance runs through the Ottoman centuries. Wallachia and Moldavia were tributary principalities under Ottoman suzerainty for some four hundred years, and the olive-oil vegetable cookery of Istanbul crossed the Danube with everything else, meeting a local tradition of long-cooked winter vegetables and staying. The Romanian dish and the Turkish zeytinyağlı pırasa are recognisably cousins.
New York City, USA — c. 1917 CE
The most famous leek dish in the world is French in every particular except that it was invented in Manhattan.
Louis Diat, who came from Montmarault in the Bourbonnais and had trained at the Ritz in Paris and London, was chef at the Ritz-Carlton on Madison Avenue. In the summer of 1917 he was looking for something cold for the hotel's roof garden, and he went back to the potage parmentier his mother and grandmother had made, the plain leek and potato soup of French domestic cooking that he and his brother had cooled with milk on hot mornings as children. He passed it through a fine sieve, enriched it with cream, chilled it thoroughly, scattered chives over the top, and named it for Vichy, the spa town near where he grew up.
What the treatment revealed is that the leek is at least as good cold as hot, which is not true of the onion. Chilling flattens sweetness and sharpens anything harsh, and a chilled onion soup tastes raw and metallic where the leek stays sweet and mild. The dish depends entirely on that property, and on straining, since a vichyssoise with any texture at all has failed.
It spread from the Ritz-Carlton to every hotel dining room in America and then back across the Atlantic, and the French adopted it readily enough as one of their own, which in every sense except geography it is.
