If Maltese cuisine has been neglected over the years, the fault is ours alone. David Darmanin on the mainstream culture that killed creative cooking
Many lay blame on the British Empire for the dissipation of our traditional culinary habits: the shifts from wine to beer, from fresh tomato sauce to ketchup, from pasta al dente to overcooked blobs of flour, from fresh minced meat to corned beef, from smoked preserved meats to luncheon meat, from home-pressed extra virgin olive oil to sunflower oil, and what have you.
But while the British are far from renowned for their culinary prowess, it must be pointed out that if we feel that our food culture has somewhat digressed, we only owe the situation to ourselves. After all, it’s not as though Queen Elizabeth came forcing bangers and mash down our throats.
In earlier years, while the Knights of St John were busy introducing the Dolce Vita culture to Malta, the farmer’s staple diet was reportedly limited to bread, tomatoes, oil and copious amounts of red wine. (They were not to blame – after all, nothing beats ħobż biż-żejt. Homemade wine must have tasted better at the time.)
Granted that fishermen and hunters ate their own catch, but let’s face it – rabbit only made it to become our national dish because the rodents were considered to be pests. Bunnies ate away the farmer’s produce, and in characteristic Maltese temperament, they were punished by slaughter, and then eaten.
The stark truth is that the Maltese popular culture has historically been more prone to quantity than quality in food, and sadly, it still largely is. Remember the Pizza Hut buffet in the 1990s?
In the past, complex or creative recipes, delicacies and fine cuisine were seemingly reserved to niches made up of those who could afford good food. Nowadays, genuine Mediterranean food is generally enjoyed by Italophiles, Francophiles or ‘foodies’ – very much like it stands in England. This is not to say that if a restaurant decides to include local rustic recipes in its menu it should mean that it is destined to fail. However, mainstream dishes are always sold in higher volumes – and our Mediterranean tradition is far from being ingrained into our mainstream. This would perhaps explain why it is not uncommon for a restaurant patron to ask for grated cheese on spaghetti with octopus, lemonade with oak-aged wine, beef or tuna fillet ‘well-done’, pasta with double-cream, ketchup on pizza, limoncello as an aperitif and vermouth as a digestif, sponge in cassatella and so on and so forth.
The mainstream grub culture in Malta remains unwilling to experiment with its very own southern culinary traditions, and instead, favours Chinese food; frozen, canned or preserved products; and whatever is trendy – such as baguettes with chicken imported from Brazil and potato crisps on the side.
In many other food traditions, creative cooking was first introduced by the poor and the mainstream, and then it climbed the social ladder.
What is sorely missed in Maltese cuisine is a historic creativity in turning offal into delicacy. In no way does this mean that we have a poor culinary culture, but rather, that our repertoire of ‘poor dishes’ is limited to snails, rabbit, horsemeat, tripe and select soups. It wouldn’t be too bad if such recipes were still popular. Ironically, it was cultural development and progress that brought about many a Maltese family’s disenfranchisement with those few rustic recipes we can call our own.
On the other hand, the most eaten Italian recipes - like the Carbonara, the pizza, the All’Amatriciana, the modern-day lasagne or the cotechino - were created by people on the poverty line. A very vast repertoire of ‘piatti poveri’ came to be simply because their creators could not afford to waste anything - so they turned scrap, unwanted fare, very cheap food or leftovers into prized ingredients. Even in the UK - fish and chips, black pudding, haggis, gravies and many soups are only a few examples of traditional recipes created by the extensive use of offal. Of course, the Mediterranean wins hands down on its successes over England’s corned beef, Bovril or Marmite.
Over the thousands of years of colonisation, we have had every opportunity to develop a strong culinary tradition by being selective on what foreign influences to include in our mainstream food and beverage culture. To some extent, we have succeeded with coffee, tea, beer, HP sauce, pizza, pasta, ravioli, braġjoli, caponata and Banoffi Pie; but still – for a society that gathers in queues the minute after it smells fried onion, we could have done so much better.
For more on Maltese traditional cuisine visit http://ciaofra.blogspot.com
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