Orange blossoms give kwareżimal its special taste. Photo: David Schembri

In a country like Malta, where food, season and tradition go hand in hand, each time of year is marked by its own food – honey rings and Christmas cake in the Yuletide season, perlini and prinjolata for carnival, figolli for Easter and so on. In the world of caterer and confectioner Gaetano Borg Bonaci, this is even more amplified. Brought up in a family of caterers and choosing the trade himself, for Gaetano and his family’s many customers, each season has its sweets – and savouries.

With Christmas and New Year over, the first season of the year is intrinsically tied to the Easter festivities, with the 40 days of Lent being preceded by that time where the sweetest of sweets are sold.

“We start the year by preparing for carnival: we make prinjolata, perlini, and we used to do the gelato di campagna, which we don’t do any longer because it’s too sweet,” Gaetano says. In the past, they also used to make perlini which resembled the carbone found in Italy, coloured green, brown and pink. “We used to call them perlini tal-imgħarfa (spoon perlini).”

Because meat was a no-go during the time of Lent, the first pies that come out of the oven at Elia are the anchovy qassatat

Lent, a period meant to be full of abstinence, fasting, prayer and charity, is surprisingly full of its own delicacies, which just goes to show that as a nation, any excuse is good for food.

Because meat was a no-go during the time of Lent, the first pies that come out of the oven at Elia are the anchovy qassatat, filled with a spinach, onion, pea and anchovy mixture. “This used to replace our meat-filled qassatat,” Gaetano says. “Nowadays, we don’t stick to the tradition of not eating meat any longer, but people still expect this qassata.”

The Maltese word for Lent, Randan, bears a striking resemblance to the Islamic equivalent, Ramadan, further proof, if any was needed, of the deep Arabic influence on our culture. But is from the Italian word for Lent, quaresima, that the season’s star sweet takes its name.

“I never understood why kwareżimal is called the Lenten sweet – it’s as full of sugar as anything else is,” Gaetano says. “I can give you 200 good kwareżimal recipes, and many of them include honey, sugar, almonds and eggs. But if you go back in time, you’ll find that almonds were considered the poor man’s sweet. Nowadays, a kilo of almonds costs €8, but in the past, almonds were cheaper, and that’s why you found them in perlini, too,” Gaetano says.

While Italians have their own quaresimali biscuits, which share a good amount of the key ingredients our sweets have, the two are different beasts. Gaetano, whose job means he is surrounded by sweets, still goes weak at the knees for the taste of cloves and orange blossom water (ilma żahar) found in the Maltese sweets. Those flavours, coupled with flour, milk, eggs, cocoa, brown sugar, almonds and cinnamon found in the sweet, are what he’d consider his favourite sweet of the season.

“I remember we used to get our orange blossom water from the Bon Pastur convent in Żabbar against a donation– the nuns used to pick orange blossoms and make it into ilma żahar there. Nowadays, they don’t do it anymore, and the water we now use isn’t quite the same,” Gaetano says fondly.

The candied peel used in the sweet is another source of memories: back in the day, Elia, his father, used to make candied peel himself, going as far as to employ a Gozitan farmer to grow a certain kind of melon which only worked in candied peel. “We used to know that its peel was done well if we could read a newspaper through it,” Gaetano reminisces.

Another sweet associated with Lent is the olive bowl (bieqja taż-żebbuġ), made entirely of marzipan and representing Christ’s suffering in the garden of Gethsemane. How exactly the suffering is to be conveyed by the marzipan creation is another one of the Lenten mysteries, but Gaetano notes that the process to make these sweets is no walk in the park (or garden).

“I remember my father coming home from work at 11 pm and making marzipan olives himself; my mother would be saying the rosary and as she beaded the rosary, he’d be making marzipan balls. They were too small and too time-consuming for him to make while at the bakery,” Gaetano reminisces.

Although sales of that item aren’t as high as they used to be, old customers from Rabat, Valletta and Sliema still flock to Elia to get their yearly fix of marzipan olives.

Another set of seasonal delicacies are those made for St Joseph, which, being on March 19, always falls during Lent.

“A lot of people I know who give up sweets for Lent make an exception for St Joseph,” Gaetano notes. For this feast, they make rice zeppoli, the sweet-ricotta filled sfineġ (also called zeppoli) and xkumvat, a deep-fried nest of sweet dough filled with custard, strawberry jam and drizzled over with hot honey. “It’s not one for the calorie conscious!” Gaetano laughs.

What Elia call sfineġ are called zeppoli by others, and Elia’s rice zeppoli are called crespelle in Italy. This confusion between zeppoli and sfineġ is not endemic to Malta, and in Italy the two terms are also used interchangeably. Not that terminology is stopping the Maltese from buying them, as Gaetano reports that two extra batches had to be made to keep up with demand this year.

Back to Lent, however, and another sweet which isn’t as calorie-free as the rest is the sweet qassata, filled with a sweet ricotta and topped with icing and coloured sugar, again, representing the joy of Easter and the new beginnings promised by spring. It is thought its shape represents Judas’s purse, a theme which is also followed in Gozo, albeit with a savoury filling, with ricotta and broad beans.

New beginnings also feature in the quintessential of Maltese Easter treats: the figolla. Gaetano remembers a time where figolli used to be shaped like people, and they would get faces to stick to the figures – a practice which they haven’t kept up.

If this range of sweets shows us anything, is it that even a time of fasting is an excuse for us to indulge.