The mainstream grub scene

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 Leiseur, and what have you.
Our perceived change in cultural preferences may have partly contributed to the repertoire of Maltese expressions starting with a bodily orifice of choice and suffixing with “ir-Re Ġorġ”, still in use until this day. Admittedly, World War II may have also played a part.
But while I consider myself far from being your everyday Anglophile, 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 like Queen Elizabeth came forcing bangers and mash down our throats.
Earlier on, 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. Granted that fishermen and hunters ate their own catch, but let’s face it – rabbit only made it to become our national dish because 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. But the mainstream 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, and although we are fond of our snails and rabbit – our limited repertoire of ‘poor recipes’ cannot be in any way compared to that of Italy, or even Britain for all that matters. The most popular Italian recipes - like the Carbonara, the pizza, the All’Amatriciana, the modern-day lasagne and 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. In England - 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, caponata and Banoffi Pie. But we’ve also missed many boats – favouring the more practical, trendy and filling ingredients to the genuine and the authentic ones. Here’s just a taste of what could have become ours:

Impepata di Cozze
Mussels in peppered tomato sauce, typical of Southern Italy
Although Maltese seas offer the perfect habitat for mussels to grow in, there is no real commercial distributor of Maltese mussels. Mussels are either available frozen from supermarkets, or fresh-imported at some fishmongers. The shelf-life of mussels is very short, and if the shells open while they are still fresh and uncooked, it means they are dead and possibly dangerous. The safest bet is to buy the fresh Sicilian mussels refreshed at fishmongers twice a week. Mussels of the North Sea are imported every Friday, but these tend to be saltier and somewhat different to the delicately flavoured species of the Med. The ones we get from Sicily are also cheap – costing anything between €5 and €8 per kilo.

What you need for one big bowl:

1Kg mussels
800g ripe tomatoes, diced
6 gloves garlic, chopped
½ cup white wine
Powdered black pepper, in abundance
4 tablespoons Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Pinch of salt
Marjoram

What to do:

Clean the mussel shells using a specific wire-brush or ask your fishmonger to do it. Remove the string attached to the mussels by pulling downwards, towards the narrow part of the shell.
In a pot, prepare a tomato sauce by lightly frying the garlic in olive oil, then adding the tomato sauce, salt, pepper and marjoram. As the sauce starts drying up, add the wine and simmer.
On low heat, add the mussels to the tomato sauce and cover with a lid. Simmer until the mussel shells open.
Enjoy with fresh bread.