We have been publishing work on Sourced for 12 months now. What a year it’s been. We have over 50 pieces on our site - all commissions are paid for by you, our subscribers! THANK YOU.
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We have one more very cool Water piece to go live this week, and then we head into Cinnamon season. We are so grateful for everyone who has been reading and sharing our wonderful contributors' work (catch up on anything you’ve missed). Today Chloe recaps the year and Anna shares a chocolate cake recipe.
Riding (out) the waves
By Chloe-Rose Crabtree
It’s only a little mind-blowing that Sourced has been live for a year. After months of zoom chats and distanced dog walks, Anna and I were simultaneously very sure about what we wanted to do with Sourced and also not at all.
As a project Sourced is very clear in its mission: publish work that gives readers a resource to find information about the political, cultural and commercial relationships we have to food and drink. But we also launched knowing it was a format that was going to grow and change.
It has been a wonderful experience to publish work from people around the world and learn through the process of commissioning and editing. Seeing our pieces used in university classes is the realization of a dream Anna and I have both had to broaden the way food and drink are not just understood but also taught.
I am also constantly worried that as a volunteer (for now) project that it sometimes gets lost in the shuffle of my other job and just living life in general. But looking at the 50+(!!) pieces we’ve put up on the website in the last 12 months, I think that worry is more impostor syndrome than anything.
When you work to create a ‘new normal’ or ‘new food media’ as we’ve been branded by the British Library, it is hard not to feel a little bit like an impostor. When there is no clear path laid out to follow it is hard to determine you’re going in the right direction.
To keep with the Water focus of the season, we are lucky to have you along for support as we navigate this ship through uncharted waters. So thank you to you dear reader. Thank you to my co-founder and co-EIC Anna. Now let’s eat some cake.
Birthday Cake
By Anna Sulan Masing
In celebration I want to give you my Chocolate Birthday Cake recipe. For my first birthday my mother made a very decorative cake, which didn’t turn out as planned and was far too fussy, and since then has made this chocolate cake, and it is honestly the best.
But, as I sit down to write it, and turn to my shelves of cookbooks… my Edmonds Cookbook is not there. I have now scoured the house, to no luck. This is the cookbook that a lot of New Zealanders would have learnt to cook with, and the one I have (had?) was given to me when I left home, 19 years, 11 months and 25 days ago. I have moved house six times in the last 12 months and 4 days (it’s been a year) and I am hoping - I am sure! - that it is somewhere where I haven’t unpacked properly.
There is a lot to ‘celebrate’ for me during this period (I also turn 40 in five days). I have put the word ‘celebrate’ in quotation marks because actually these are all markers of time passing - and that does need celebrating, but with the passing of time we can have a lot of mixed feelings. It is ok to not always be joyus about it. We use food to mark time, and I guess that is what this cake is - the annual ritual of another birthday and the familiarity of it is comforting.
As I don’t have my specific recipe I will share the updated version, that is from the Edmonds online recipe site (and yes, Edmonds is a brand, this recipe book is a very successful branding exercise) I am going to leave in the branded items to keep it ‘authentic’ but obvs you don’t need to use those! (And unless you’re in NZ you probably can’t get them). The key to this recipe is that there is no chocolate used!
175g butter, softened
1¾ cups Chelsea white sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
3 eggs
½ cup cocoa
2 cups Edmonds standard flour
2 tsp Edmonds baking powder
1 cup Meadow Fresh milk
Chelsea icing sugar (optional)
Preheat the oven to 180˚C. Grease a 22cm deep round cake tin and line the base with baking paper.
Cream the butter, sugar and vanilla essence until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.
Sift the cocoa, flour and baking powder together and add to the creamed mixture alternately with the milk. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin.
Bake for 45–55 minutes or until the cake springs back when lightly touched. Leave in the tin for 10 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack to cool.
When cold, ice with Chocolate Buttercream Icing or dust with icing sugar.
What Chloe is eating/drinking:
The last few weeks of my life have been a blur of take-aways and frozen dumplings. We’re recipe testing at work so when I get home I have very little desire to cook. One of the things that saves me when this happens is instances where a meal is already half cooked for me. Sometimes all the energy I have is to make a couple sides or even just a salad. I spoke about this with someone else recently, but its strange that people seem to be ashamed to serve a meal they didn’t cook from start to finish. There is a lot of joy in spending hours cooking a complete meal but sometimes you dont have the time and I’d rather let someone else do the heavy lifting so i can come in and finish with the garnish and a couple side salads. Sometimes if I want to make it seem fancy I call these meals ‘deconstructed four-hands dining’:
The local butcher sells brisket and rotisserie chickens with a side of roasted potatoes and onions. We usually get the chicken as I use the bones to make stock but my partner changed it up with the brisket and it was a real treat. I blended the roasted onions it came with to make a gravy and served everything with a spicy coleslaw and some Yorkshire puds when we had friends come to dinner and everyone was very happy.
Last weekend there was some leftover food from work so I was able to come home and reconfigure fried chicken cutlets into tacos that had weirdly reminded me of a baja fish taco, not because the chicken was in any way ‘fishy’ but the crunch of the breading with the coleslaw I added (have I mentioned that we eat a lot of cabbage at my house) wrapped in a warm corn tortilla just felt like I was sitting on the beach.
Reading List
As we finish up on Water season, here are some ‘water’ pieces to read or listen to. There is so much to talk about in regards to water, we merely scratched the surface. For Sourced, we were also keen to look at Water in a broader sense, and use these reading lists to help guide you in further research.
One of the topics I (Anna) wanted to look at, but just didn’t have time to do it justice, is how heat waves affect waterways - the heating of rivers and streams and the seaside can devastate the temperatures that life in the water needs to survive. Here are some pieces that cover the recent heatwave in the PNW this summer and the devastating effects it had:
Crushing heat wave in Pacific Northwest and Canada cooked shellfish alive by the millions
Rise in shellfish-related food poisoning linked to extreme heat
Waterways need to be nurtured and looked after and valued. A lot of this knowledge has been lost, particularly with a colonial mindset. Clarissa Wei, in this 2016 piece, looks at the Owen Valley and how the loss of Indeginous custodianship has made it barren.
Also looking at Californian rights is this podcast episode of Good Food - Mother Nature, California drought, water rights