Crossing Malta

Buenos Aires based Dan Perlman, who blogs at SaltShaker, explores Malta's culinary traditions with a quote from Roosevelt. From SaltShaker:

It’s amazing, sometimes, how little we know about the world out there. It’s one of the fascinating things about the internet and blogging, that we discover all sorts of tidbits that lead to more information, about one thing or another, somewhere else on the planet. At the same time, to use a medical metaphor, it’s surgical - it’s not systemic - we focus on a particular thing, place, item, person… that catches our attention, and click on links that lead to other links, etc. - you know the drill.

Geography - and I don’t mean that in just the “this country is there and that’s it capital” sense, but including the cultural and political sense, has almost disappeared from our schools. There are constantly little notes in newspapers about how little kids from one country or another know about the rest of the world. I like to think I’m doing my bit by bringing up the food culture of various locales around the world, often that are nearly unknown to most of us. When I posted that last weekend’s Casa S dinner would be celebrating the ancient festival of Mnarja from the islands of Malta, almost everyone making a reservation hesitated and asked something to the effect of “Where is Malta and what’s their food all about?”

..The Mnarja festival is a derivative of the ancient pagan festival of Luminaria, but somewhere along the way got hooked into the festival of saints Peter and Paul - probably when those Knights of Malta came into play in 1530 - the one thing folks seem to know about Malta is either the Cross or the Falcon...On to the food - which seems to be derivative, for the most part, from southern Italy and Sicily, though clearly with influences from some of the other cultures, in particular Moorish, that have occupied the islands, but more, from what I can see, probably by the simple limitations of living on a somewhat isolated archipelago - i.e., many of the recipes tend to use the same few ingredients over and over again in different combinations and proportions, presumably just based on what’s available locally - for example, potatoes and cauliflower are apparently the primary vegetables grown, along with peas and tomatoes, and pop up over and over again.

It made for some interesting “trimming” as I worked with each dish, since I didn’t want them all to taste the same, so I’ve left things out of traditional recipes and reinterpreted them as I went along - but after all, that’s what I tend to do every week - I use the cuisine I’m working with as an inspiration rather than a textbook. The cuisine also seems to lean more on herbs than on spices, perhaps historically there just were not that many available? That part seemed surprising given the Arabic portion of the islands’ history...

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