WATCH ABOVE: There’s a push to make the green onion cake Edmonton’s official dish. Fletcher Kent has more on the cake crusade.
EDMONTON — It’s fried, it’s flavourful, it’s delicious. Whether it’s at the Edmonton International Fringe Festival, K-Days or Taste of Edmonton, there’s always a bustle of activity surrounding the tent selling green onion cakes.
“We open at noon. I’ve got people at the door at 11 going, ‘Are you open yet? Are you open yet?'” said Mark Britton, a green onion cake vendor at this year’s Fringe Festival.
“It’s a Fringe staple for me. This is the first thing I do. I mean, on the first day of the fringe the first place I come is this green onion cake tent,” said Fringer Kory Mathewson.
The green onion cake originated in northern China, but a local restaurateur started serving a slightly altered version of the dish at Edmonton festivals in the early 80s. Now, there’s a push underway to make the local delicacy Edmonton’s official dish.
“My mission is to have the green onion cake declared the official dish of Edmonton,” said Salma Kaida, who has started a blog and online petition to do just that.
Kaida hopes to get 5,000 signatures on her petition. The cake crusader believes the green onion cake is a culinary link to what makes a person an Edmontonian.
“I think it is about culture. I think that sometimes Edmontonians struggle to describe themselves and this is just one little piece of the conversation,” she said.
“I feel proud to know that there’s something that’s uniquely Edmontonian,” added Mathewson. “There’s not many things that I can celebrate as being Edmontonian. If the green onion cake is one of them, I say I’ll embrace that to the end of the earth.”
With files from Fletcher Kent, Global News.