When I tell people I’m half-Maltese and talk about food, I’m usually met with the following response: “does Malta really have its own cuisine?”
My conversation partner doesn’t mean to be rude. The question is usually encased in a positive curiosity that’s been lingering for years spent knowing many Maltese-Australians. After all, Australia does not have a widespread Maltese restaurant scene in the same way that Thailand or Italy does.
Stephen Sultana, who immigrated to Australia from Malta six years ago, tells SBS he’s noticed similar misunderstandings about Maltese cuisine. “Some people in Australia often assume that Maltese food is just pastizzi and Italian pasta, but there’s so much more to it than that,” says Sultana, co-owner of Limestone Café – a venue in Sydney’s west that features many Maltese dishes on the menu.
“Maltese cuisine is good food that needs to be more recognised”.
Some people in Australia often assume that Maltese food is just pastizzi and Italian pasta, but there’s so much more to it than that.
Sultana explains that traditional Maltese food is not commonly the fare of fine dining haunts. Instead, it’s home cooking and the day-to-day food of family life.
“Food is very important to the people of Malta,” Sultana says. “After all the hard times that the Maltese people have been through over the years, [countless foreign occupations, poverty and war], the Maltese have always managed to cook good food for their loved ones at home – food that has been passed down from generation to generation and is still loved today.”
Stream free On Demand
Shane Delia's Malta
series • Travel
PG
series • Travel
PG
A diverse food identity
In the new SBS series, Shane Delia’s Malta, we learn that to better understand what Maltese cuisine really is, we must first understand the historic influences shaping it.
Throughout the six-part series, viewers discover Malta's initial cultural influencers were the early Phoenicians, Eastern Romans and Arabs. The Sicilians also bore a huge influence on Malta. In 1530, the Maltese islands were handed to the Order of St. John, as a vassal state of Sicily. The French, under Napoleon, took Malta from the Order in 1798, before being expelled by the English in 1800 with Portuguese and Neopolitan assistance. Finally, in 1974, Malta got its independence from Britain and became a republic. Today, Malta continues to be part of the British Commonwealth.
According to Delia and the many other chefs he interviews during the series - on location in Malta - Maltese cuisine is a fusion of its diverse past. In episode three, Delia talks to Terrone Restaurant’s managing director, chef Adrian Hili, who is at the cutting-edge of defining what modern Maltese food really is today.
“People have been trying to put a finger on [what Maltese cuisine is] for the last couple of 1000 years but I don't think it really conforms to any sort of one thing,” Hili tells Delia on Shane Delia’s Malta on SBS.
“If you look at the history of Malta, its food is intertwined with that. Every culture that has come to Malta has left their influence on Malta's food scene. So you've got a French influence, obviously you've got a big Italian influence, and the influence of the Arabs and the Moors – it's all come together. The Maltese have always taken bits from every culture that have come on the islands and made it their own. That’s what has moulded what Maltese cuisine is today.”
Malta on a plate
Sitting beside a Maltese harbour eating a Maltese octopus dish freshly made by Hili, Delia concludes that authentic Maltese cuisine is defined by its cultural mix, blended with a sense of purpose. These ingredients, backed by a historical and cultural story that is specifically Maltese, merge together on a plate to define a Maltese serve of food.
“Here in Malta, [food] has a history,” Delia says on the show. “Everything on a plate is harmonious and has a sense of purpose.”
To demonstrate the cultural fusion happening on a Maltese plate, consider the example of Maltese kannoli. It's the close cousin of Sicilian cannoli with a few differences (including its spelling).
Edible land snails are a big hit in Malta. Called, bebbuxu, collecting and eating snails is as normal in Malta as it is in France, a former occupier. Then, as mentioned in Shane Delia's Malta, there's corned beef - a remnant of British rule, which features as a common ingredient across a lot of Maltese dishes. Malta has also adapted the English bread and butter pudding by adding an Arabic twist. The result is pudina – a family favourite that Delia makes in Shane Delia's Malta.
Home-cooking: rustic and celebratory
Beyond the external influences on Maltese food, it’s important to recognise its independent essence, born of farming land, the Mediterranean Sea and home gardens. The food is rustic – there are a lot of stews, soups, pastas and fruit-based sweets.
“There were also hard times where people didn’t have a lot of options for food, so they’d cook rabbit from their barns. Or, they would rely a lot on what the fisherman caught,” says Sultana. The most popular fish on the archipelago is lampuki (the Maltese word for mahi-mahi), which is the main ingredient in lampuki pie (torta tal-lampuki).
Religion also sways what the people of Malta eat. “There’s nearly a different sweet for every month, made for a different religious ceremony or tradition.”
Village biscuits (biskuttini tar-rahal), decorated with blue or pink icing, are served at christenings. There is the Maltese carnival cake prinjolata eaten in February before lent. Zeppoli (deep-fried eclairs filled with sweet ricotta) are made for St Joseph's Day in March.
Then there’s my personal favourite: biskuttini tal-lewz or almond macaroons, which are usually prepared over Christmas, Easter and other festive holidays.
My mother made this almond cookie whenever she could: it’s the reason why I feel nurtured every time I taste almonds. The macaroon reminds me of my mother’s warmth and the sweetness of life.
Lined with rice paper on its base, the almond biscuit embodies Maltese home cooking. It’s wrapped in memories of casual conversations in the kitchen, baking smells resonating from the oven and alfresco dining in our garden every time the sun shone.
Although these almond macaroons provide me with a maternal Maltese food memory, they represent a true sense of the country's multiculturalism and my own cultural fusions as a half-Maltese, first-generation Australian.
So now, when I am asked about what Maltese cuisine is, I know what to say. Maltese food symbolises the complex sum of Malta's culturally diverse past. Fuse this with home cooking, a vegetable garden, local adaptations of recipes, independence and a blend of Mediterranean flavours and you have Maltese multiculturalism on a plate. It's yet another tasty representation of the deliciousness that can result from diversity.
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SBS Food is a 24/7 foodie channel for all Australians, with a focus on simple, authentic and everyday food inspiration from cultures everywhere. NSW stream only. Read more about SBS Food
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