Dining in Malta

Octopus Stew, cooked with peas, olives, tomatoes, and white wine

There is only so much one can do with institutional food. Cooking dinner for 500 or so, as the conference hotel where I am staying does, can only be seen in industrial terms. The decidedly Mediterranean-inspired buffets provide nourishment, yet everything - including the beautiful desserts - somehow falls a bit flat. 

I am thankful for a few opportunities to explore Maltese food outside the conference environment. I am told that the meat of choice for a Maltese feast is actually rabbit, with the head and "boney parts" stewed in a tomato sauce served with pasta as a first plate and the stewed rabbit meat served with roasted potatoes and vegetables as a second plate. The Italian influence in both content and style of serving is apparent. While English is spoken nearly everywhere on the island, Italian is unquestionably the language of food. 

Yet Maltese are quick to point out the unique aspects of Maltese cooking. While pasta is often offered as a first course, meat is usually served with potatoes. Seafood of every kind is plentiful - even if very expensive. Sea bass appears to be a nearly daily staple, along with beautiful bread, abundant olive oil, fresh goat cheeses (known as cheeselets, which I have had both spiced in olive oil and fried in crumbs), and the biggest capers I have ever seen. 

Dessert usually revolves around either fresh fruit (it is blood orange and grapefruit season) or something employing dates and/or figs. Even at this decidedly non-touristy time of the year, hawkers on the street sell various forms of nougat (a kind of fudge-like thing with nuts or other flavorings). Tiny cookies filled with figs and fried appear to be a breakfast staple. Numerous other sweet pastries are sold in small shops everywhere called pastizzerias with Italian-style small cups of coffee or cappuccino. 

A fig-filled fried crêpe

The few open fields of Malta are filled with vines, and the local wines are both white and red and very inexpensive. A meal without wine appears to be akin to an ocean without water.  Dinners are long and lingering.

Undoubtedly, I have merely scratched the surface of Maltese cooking. It is really amazing to me how much more most cultures around the world value food - be it China, India, Europe, or Latin America.  Food is an art form. Although the idea of "convenience foods" are spreading, there still seems to be a greater appreciation for the beauty of what food can be. Perhaps this is returning a bit in the United States, at least in certain quarters as local ingredients, seasonal dining, and home cooking become a bit more prevalent.  

Just one small anecdote to close. At a small restaurant near the hotel, a couple of colleagues and I have hosted several small dinners this week. The restaurant is small, no more than 10 tables. Only one waitress is not part of the family. The menu is enormous, filled with choices, yet it becomes clear very quickly that only items reliant on seasonal ingredients are available. When one of my fellow diners ordered a caprese salad (fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil in olive oil), the waitress gave him the kind of look one gives a recent arrival from Mars. "How do you expect me to make you a decent caprese in January?" she asked incredulously...

Visiting summer holiday spots in January...

View from Valletta

I arrived in Malta in the throws of a fierce Mediterranean storm, the kind that I am told are not particularly unusual in January.  The cold winds howled at a clip great enough to nearly knock me off my feet as I made my way to a nearby drugstore to buy some toothpaste on Thursday evening.  Huge waves crashed into the sea wall, sending spray many feet into the air.  It was not a day for a pleasant stroll along the promenade.  

Even as the weather improved and I found enough free time between meetings to venture out, I was reminded that visiting a place like Malta in January is not ideal.  Many shops and restaurants close down for the month of January and others keep irregular hours, ready to close up early for the day if business is especially slow.  I found downtown Valletta nearly deserted on Sunday afternoon, with only a few of the tackiest tourist shops open. The silence was broken only by a vibrant celebration of the feast of St Paul's shipwreck outside the famous church of the same name. 

Mdina Cathedral

Valletta, the capital city of this tiny island nation, sits on a peninsula high up above the sea. The walls are, at times, nearly twenty stories in height, plunging down to the sea. The straight, Renaissance-era streets (this is the new capital, after all) are lined with shops, churches, coffee houses, and offices. From the gardens at peninsula's end, there is a fabulous view out over the seas and the surrounding communities. Sometimes it seems that even an ugly city - which Valletta is decidedly not - would appear beautiful under the golden light of the Mediterranean sun. There's just nothing quite like Mediterranean sunlight.  

The northern side of Malta is densely populated, with one village flowing into another (although I'm told that local communities have a fiercer-than-average local pride and identity). This gives way slightly as you head inland, where a few farms begin to appear in the sloping valleys. The ancient capital city, Mdina, is found high on a hill near the center of the island. An ancient fortress containing several Roman ruins and even more ancient burial sites, Mdina is a medieval beauty. Visiting her on a sunny Monday morning in January was perhaps an advantage. Although many shops were closed, I had the narrow streets mostly to myself.  Tranquility was a word that came frequently to my mind as I explore tiny alleys, ancient churches, and a few museums. These are the kinds of museums that were established to display the "stuff in the basement" of churches that includes everything from medieval liturgical books to early modern altarpieces. You never know what treasure might lurk behind the next corner in a place like this.

Seventeenth century altar painting of the nativity in Mdina Cathedral Museum

 The fine cathedral of Mdina, constructed after the great earthquake of 1693, engages all the senses with music, incense, and beautiful artwork, including "tombstones" of inlaid marble that cover the floor of the nave and the chapels, exulting in Latin long deceased bishops and archbishops, often depicting them as skeletons setting aside their earthly crown for a climb toward heaven. 

I am not sure I would recommend visiting Malta for a holiday in January. But it has certainly had its advantages in terms of tranquility.  

Artifacts

St. John's Co-Cathedral - Valletta, Malta

It is hard to travel in southern Europe or the Middle East without using the word "artifacts". The lands around the Mediterranean are abundant with remnants of millennia of human civilization, as are parts of India, China, and elsewhere. I remember being awed in my earliest travels by churches and Russian fortress walls that had endured from the 12th century or so in Moscow. The Mediterranean makes this look positively recent by comparison. This is as clear in Malta as anywhere, with the site of Paul's shipwreck from the book of Acts, numerous Roman ruins, and prehistoric temple remains dating back several thousand years before the Romans.  

Malta is a crossroads. A tiny island about 10 miles wide and 20 miles long, it is home to a rather densely packed 350,000 people. The architecture is in some ways definitionally southern European, with an abundance of baroque Catholic churches, grand villas, and sprawling piazzas. Yet in another way it has a deeply Middle Eastern feel, with many homes constructed in a manner you'd see in Jordan or Lebanon. Sitting almost at the middle of the Mediterranean, Malta has been a crossroads of cultures - Roman, Greek, Arab, Norman, British, and Italian, among others.  

This is visible even in the "artifacts" of language. While British English and to a lesser degree Italian are spoken nearly everywhere (Malta gained independence from Britain in 1964 and sits not far from the southern coast of Sicily), Maltese is used on most signs and is heard everywhere. Maltese is at first a disorienting language to bold in written form, with its numerous additional characters added to the Latin alphabet.  The language is Semitic, in the same family of languages as Arabic, Hebrew, and Amharic, though it is the only Semitic language to be written in the Latin script. 

A sample of Maltese and English

There are few architectural or other artifacts to recall that Malta was under Arab control for several centuries, as was its northern neighbor, Sicily. These artifacts of Muslim presence here have largely disappeared in the past few centuries. It is not dissimilar from the way in which Christian artifacts have mostly disappeared from areas that were once predominantly Christian - Algeria, Mesopotamia, Turkey, and to a lesser degree Central Asia and western China. In all of these places, once vital and numerous Christian communities died out, some over the course of centuries, while others disappeared more quickly, leaving in some places - such as Kyrgyzstan - only a few Christian tombstones written in Syriac script as physical reminders of this Christian presence.  

Times change. Things that seem permanent - even entire civilizations - pass away leaving only few artifacts in museums to remind us of what was most precious or most intimate to these people. It's a good reminder to those coming from the "young" side of the world that there's a lot of accreted experience in this world, and that it has much to teach us.  

My thinking on artifacts has been inspired in part by Philip Jenkins' The Lost History of Christianity, which is a good, readable-yet-grounded look at Asian and Middle Eastern Christianity - the "eastern half" of church history that is all too rarely told, but so very important.  Highly recommend.