Rehabilitating traditional Maltese cuisine

Five Maltese students who are on a one-year internship at the Hilton Heathrow, London, as part of a diploma programme with the Institute of Tourism Studies recently organised a Maltese night at the Brasserie restaurant with a stupendous array of traditional Maltese dishes.

Friends who attended said they had never felt so homesick. Sadly, except for a few paragraphs carried in the two English language dailies, probably based on a press release sent out by the office of George Bonello du Puis, the High Commissioner in London, who actively supported the evening, the event received no other coverage. And yet, this is what sells a destination to tourists, not participation in the Eurovision Song Festival.

Discerning tourists, the ones that we have been trying for years to attract to our shores, are interested in the culture of the country that they are visiting, and culture includes the cuisine.

Imagine going to Naples and not eating pizza. And yet what are the origins of pizza? Left-over bread dough topped with leftover tomato sauce, very similar to our hobz biz-zejt, except that pizza was hyped and marketed to mythical status worldwide while in our restaurants hobz biz-zejt has been replaced by a bastardised version of bruschetta because bruschetta sounds more up-market and because it disposes of stale bread which would otherwise be unsaleable.

We are kicking a gift horse in the mouth. Maltese cuisine is the result of a combination of the cuisines of the different cultures that held dominion over these islands. It is a remarkable fusion of Arab, Turkish, Italian, Sicilian, French, German, English and other cuisines, which is unrivalled anywhere else in the world.

Yet, if restaurant menus were anything to go by, anybody would think that Maltese cuisine consists solely of octopus in garlic, ross fil-forn, timpana and bragioli.

I get the impression we are somehow ashamed of our traditional cuisine and consider it second rate. Cooking programmes on television and recipes published in the press promote haute cuisine - ambitious dishes that are way beyond the culinary capabilities and the pockets of the average housewife.

Nobody bothers to promote the humble lucertu bbuttunat, or the makkarell biz-zalza hamra or the bebbux mimli bl-irkotta. These and similar dishes are never featured on restaurant menus.

Some time ago, while walking in the outskirts of Gharghur, I met an elderly lady who told me she made sweet rikotta by boiling fig tree shoots in milk.

I tried it at home and the result was pure ambrosia. I had never tasted anything like it. Our senior citizens have a wealth of information about traditional Maltese cuisine which is yet untapped and as a first step towards rehabilitating traditional Maltese food the ministry of tourism and the Malta Tourism Authority should find a way of tapping into and recording this fount of knowledge for posterity.