Yeah he’s nice but is he spicy?
For our first subscriber newsletter of August we recap Water season and introduce Cinnamon season
Image from graffiti near Chloe’s house
Welcome to Cinnamon Season!! In our earliest imagining of Sourced, cinnamon was an ingredient we wanted to explore and share with you and now after a full year it is finally here. To celebrate we’ve opened up this paid newsletter to all subscribers so we can share a little highlight reel of what we’ve worked on for our previous season.
To start the newsletter, here is our Cinnamon season syllabus, so you can view our aims with the season and keep up to date with our reading list.
All the work published on our site are funded by paid subscriptions to our newsletter via substack or Patreon, we have defined Sourced as a public research project, and what that means is that all the work we commission is open for all to read, and also that we will explore different ways, formats, languages to share knowledge. Our paid newsletters are a little ‘thank you’ from us for supporting Sourced, and often have the background research we are doing, ahead of a season or talk through some of the difficulties we encounter on this journey.
If you would like to upgrade your subscription, click below - and thank you to all who have kept us going this year! And thank you for all who read our work and the new followers we have had due to the ‘Alicia Kennedy’ affect!
The Essay
Anna Sulan Masing
Our paid subscriber newsletters (which is what is scheduled for this date) is formatted with an essay, an overview of what we have eaten or drunk (as a way to contextualise our relationship with the everyday food), a recipe and a reading list. We take turns with each component.
My essay this time is actually just a highlight of all that we have published in Water season, as the usual space for this (our monthly free newsletter) had a slight change of schedule as we wanted to highlight one of the charities we had been working with, Made In Hackney (read that here!), PLUS a lot has been published recently, and before we move on we thought you might like a catch up.
So, the round up of Water Season! In order of publishing:
First we start each season with the syllabus, and this is what we had for Water (nb: the reading lists continue to be updated throughout the year, and we need to add to this one!)
Something in the Water – How Burton’s Beer Scene Boomed by Hollie Stephens
Interview: Catherine Chong, Catherine talks about peat (bogs!) and it work within the eco system and it's role in regulating water cycles - and it is #PeatFreeApril, a campaign to raise awareness to not use compost with peat in it!
Interview: Doug Bierend, Anna spoke to Doug about fungi through the lens of water - this was water as an ingredient and as part of an environment, and also with our concept of migration in mind.
It Travelled With Me, Within Me, a photo essay by Yvonne Maxwell
Who Feeds London? An interview series by Chloe-Rose Crabtree that has us looking at how food moves with people as they migrate overseas. Historically this migration has happened for many reasons and how food moves has depended on those reasons.
Interview: Chanchala Gunewardena, Anna speaks to Chanchala Gunewardena, Founder /CEO Kimbula Kithul, about how taking her product across oceans and seas is the way to continue to develop the craft of this traditional ingredient.
Cockles of My Heart: a modern history by Chelsea Carter
India Pale Ale, a name to be reckoned with by Anja Madhvani
Holiday 'Home': Rum Punch and the Diaspora by Joseph Pilgrim
Onion Pakora Weather, by Sejal Sukhadwala, voiced by Shobna Gulati and film made by Emily Chao.
What Anna Ate
This last week has seen me writing at the counter of restaurants as I have lunch; solo dining is truly the best way to live life and what I have missed most about restaurants.
My two favourite places are Kiln Soho, and Smoking Goat in Shoreditch. They both do food of/ inspired by/ influenced from South East Asia and it feels like home and also I experience new flavours. Eat, read, write and drink wine - this is all I want from life.
An approximation of Gujarati Masala Chai
Chloe-Rose Crabtree
When I shot this video to accompany Sejal Sukhadwala’s piece ‘Onion Pakora Weather’ with editor extraordinaire Emily Chao I knew I had to get the chai right. But I also knew that googling ‘authentic chai recipe’ wouldn’t really get me very far. I still did it and was predictably disappointed. In fact trying to find English results for non-western recipes on the internet is generally a fraught process, each recipe claiming to be the most ‘authentic’ or ‘traditional’ in order to be as SEO-friendly as possible. The first time around I thought I found a recipe that might work, but the result was so bitter and undrinkable I knew something had gone wrong. Luckily Emily had time to reshoot the chai making and the results the second time around were delicious. The trick? I stopped looking up ‘masala chai recipes’ – a fool’s errand to begin with as there are as many variations on the drink as there are households that drink it– and instead searched for what specificities to look out for in Gujrati masala chai. Two things stood out most: serve it PIPING hot and the chai is not ready until a skin starts to form on top of the mixture as it boils.
More than anything this process affirmed to me how much written recipes can miss when dealing with dishes with nostalgia like onion pakora and masala chai. For people who grew up with them, there is no real recipe, there is just the way they are made, tweaks made depending on what is in the household larder, or the mood of the person making them. In these cases recipes serve us better as guides rather than formulas to follow to a tee. This is something Anna and I have discussed about in relation to the the ‘recipes’ we share in these newsletters. I am sure our long-time subscribers have notices that these recipes have become looser in their measurements and that is something we will likely keep doing.
So this recipe is my approximation of Gujrati masala chai, an amalgamation of recipes I read (and the nostalgic blog posts that prefaced them), videos of street vendors ladling the hot drink out of vats and composed by the spices in my kitchen.
Gather your spices: I used equal parts ground ginger and cinnamon (about 1 tablespoon each), roughly one half tablespoon of ground cardamom (you can also use green cardamom seeds), 5-6 black peppercorns and 2 cloves. Throw them all in the spice (or coffee) grinder and blend until even.
Bring water to a boil in a small pot. Once boiling add 2-3 scoops (tablespoons) of strong black tea and an equal amount of your spice mix and let boil for 5-10 minutes.
Add milk (as much as you like) and bring to a boil. Let boil for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. You’ll know the chai is ready when the top starts to form a skin that breaks when you stir the pot. (As seen in the Onion Pakira Weather video!)
Strain the hot mixture into a cup, mix with a generous amount of sugar and enjoy with your snack of choice.
Our Reading List this issue is simply, check out our new syllabus!