Somebody please tell our backwoods prime minister that English food is streets ahead of Maltese food
We shouldn’t be surprised that he thinks Maltese food is better than English food – this is the man who said that his favourite sound is the ping of the microwave because it means that food is ready to be eaten.
The Maltese, except for the privileged and sometimes not even then, eat rubbish. The Maltese, unless they are exceptional, can’t cook to save their lives.
The Maltese diet is crap, which is why Maltese people top the obesity rankings and have dull hair which just won’t shine and such bad complexions that the women feel they have to wear a ton of thick make-up.
The Maltese have such poor standards for food ingredients and cooking that restaurants lower their game instead of raising it.
The prime minister’s jokes about English food are tragically out of date. The man travels without seeing and knows nothing about the subject. Paris, Rome and Milan are no longer the food capitals of the world and haven’t been for ages. London takes that title. It has the highest concentration of fabulously good restaurants with every cuisine imaginable.
The best Italian food I have ever eaten wasn’t anywhere in Italy or even in Malta. It is in London. It isn’t just the food, either: it’s also the service (perfect) and the design of the interior (beautiful), which you just don’t get anywhere else in Europe.
This is something I know about: unlike the prime minister, food actually is my day job.
The prime minister also went to Scotland. I trust he wasn’t stupid enough to run down Scottish food. Scotland has some of the best fresh ingredients in the world and knows how to serve them to perfection, which is ‘keep it simple because what you’ve got here is fantastic and there’s no need to douse it in sauce’.
Oysters, salmon, venison, scallops, mussels, Angus beef, boar – just beautiful, and all from Scotland itself, fresh as fresh can be. Coming back to Malta for naqra awrat mill-fish farm jew qarnit mis-Senegal or beef fillet that is meant to be fresh but is actually fresh-frozen and defrosted is real hell after that.
I am sick of this ignorance and the Malta-centric myths that brainwashed backwater newts like the prime minister repeat constantly. I quote from his speech at the London School of Economics last Monday:
I, for one, have no qualms in saying that on balance, Britain’s 200 year direct influence on Malta was essentially positive. If anything, it left us with an impeccable Anglo-Saxon work ethic which we can couple with our Mediterranean lifestyle and food. And we thank God it is not the other way round, since I cannot imagine myself living in a country with Mediterranean work practices and English food!
Food and work ethic, indeed. You will notice that he said nothing about those great British traditions of democracy and free speech, or the fact that Britain’s greatest legacy in Malta is parliamentary elections, the Westminster model for our parliament, the language and a civil service structure that saved us from becoming another Sicily. What a sad klutz.
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I live in Scotland, so thank you for this post. To outsiders, British food is just fish and chips, or the deep fried Mars bar. But probably, the best produce and the best restaurants in the country are over here. Not to mention that if you’re after Oriental food and Indian food, there’s plenty to offer of that too.
There’s no such thing as British food and living in Scotland, you should know that.
There’s English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh food.
While Scottish food is regularly found among the world’s most favourite, English is frequently voted the worst.
[Daphne – English food is voted the worst only by those who don’t know what they’re talking about, and who confuse food with cooking. The two are different. Some Maltese food can be really bad, but Maltese cooking tends to be worse, for instance. Well-cooked English food made with good ingredients is excellent. But then I have always preferred simple food and not what I call medieval concoctions with flavours and textures that fight each other for attention.]
Not to be an anorak, but seeing as you mentioned medieval cooking, the different flavours and textures were kept distinct, one per course.
[Daphne – Not at all. It was heavily influenced by the ‘Moorish’ style.]
Yes and no.
Broadly speaking, there are three schools which came together to produce what you call medieval cuisine: the Greek Aristotelian trinity of bread, wine and olive oil (used in Christian liturgy, and no coincidence), the Northern European meat-and-game tradition, and the Baghdad school with its sugar and spice.
Real medieval food was neither the pigging-out-plus-food-fight, nor the spice-and-rancid-meat that is the staple of Maltese “medeevil” festivals. It was refined. It had its own literature. It was the subject of intelligent debate.
It is also at the root of contemporary European cuisine, and the reason why the sweet course is eaten at the end of the meal (that’s Aristotle speaking down the centuries).
But we can both agree that to Jo, this is all Chinese. Food.
Of course there’s such a thing as British food. Fish and chips, for example, although with some differences. The preferred fish in England is cod; in Scotland it is haddock. Steak pie, scones and cream, ham (I don’t mean the sandwich ham, obviously), lamb stew etc.
Then there’s proper Scottish food like haggis and stovies. Not British, because they’re not something traditional to anywhere but Scotland.
How come Maltese food cannot be cooked with good ingredients?
[Daphne – I didn’t say that Maltese food can’t be cooked with good ingredients. I said that Maltese food ISN’T cooked with good ingredients. And that’s because Maltese people think spending on good ingredients is a waste of money. This must be the only place in the world where spaghetti sauce is made with tins of corned beef rather than with good minced beef or a beef/pork mixture. Laziness, ineptitude and indifference to what’s on the plate are other factors, which is why you will get people making their tomato sauce with tinned tomatoes even in August when farmers are practically giving their tomatoes away.]
Maltese cuisine is irrespective of eating trends or who cooks it. The comparisons shall be made only when the right ingredients are chosen and the food is prepared by those who really know how to do it the right way.
In my opinion your argument is similar to comparing two brands of cars, one of an unreliable make while the other is of high repute. If you trust the unreliable car to a good driver and the other to a drunk or a high junkie, the latter is definitely going to crash before, but that would be an unfair and null argument right?
[Daphne – Wrong: the food culture of a country is not judged by the superior ability of a couple of good home cooks and two or three good restaurants. It is judged by the average level of competence, interest and knowledge. You don’t need specialist knowledge to make a good tomato sauce, but I was horrified to discover that the village version of tomato sauce for ravioli is made from kunserva and water thickened with semolina. In God’s name, why?]
Sorry to be an even bigger anorak bit it depends where you are talking about in Europe and the period. Academics still can’t agree on when the Middle Ages even began and ended.
[Daphne – Don’t worry about it. There are few things I love more than an anorak debate, especially about matters such as this.]
On the topic of English food being terrible, isn’t it true that generally terrible food is eaten in English homes mostly due to the fact that England was the first country to experience the Industrial Revolution and therefore the first to lose, or rather forget, its culinary tradition.
[Daphne – No, it isn’t true. Poor people ate bad food in England well into the 20th century not because they liked bad food or knew no better, but because they were poor and couldn’t afford anything else. This was the case throughout Europe (I’ll stick to this continent) for the obvious reason that good food has always cost money. Even in Sicily, which has a well developed food culture, poor people ate rubbish well into the last century. I have spoken to older people there who remember working all day out in the fields as farm labourers in return for wages that consisted of a loaf of bread a day, which was all they had to eat.
You make the understandable and quite common error of thinking of the cuisine of a country as the cuisine of the entire country, rather than that of the people in that country who could actually afford the luxury of food choices and preparation. Traditional Maltese food? Most Maltese ate unadorned bread and a few boiled vegetables, day in, day out. The recipes we think of as ‘traditional Maltese food’ were only possible for the minority.]
Celebrity chefs such as Gary Rhodes have great books proving the richness and diversity of English food. It is just a pity that it has not yet made it back into English homes.
The culinary industry is another matter entirely. For example, the best food can be found in cities such as London and New York.
[Daphne – You will find bad or wholly indifferent food in most homes anywhere in the world, albona, including Italy, where contrary to the popular mythology lots of people can’t actually cook, just like everywhere else. Judging by what I see in people’s supermarket trolleys here in Malta, and by the discussions I hear on the radio and television morning shows about what women are actually cooking that day, the situation in homes here is dreadful. Even the ‘expert cooks’ they call in haven’t a clue – I listened to one of them on the radio in the car the other day and her suggestions for suitable ingredients to mix into a cold pasta salad nearly had me pull over to retch.]
My anorak is bigger than yours. The ‘De Re Coquinaria’ was written in the 4th century AD. It was the bible of the Classical Graeco-Roman school of cuisine. So my Middle Ages starts very early.
This, my friends, is the true basis of European civilisation. There is more wisdom in one sentence of pseudo-Apicius than in 8 km of shelf space of EU legislation.
I take my food seriously, because it defines what I am. Having said that, I’m more of a cocktails man. And boy, could I write reams about their quality in Malta.
I’ve had to send a gin and tonic back, with instructions to put it in the same glass. You can’t go much lower than that.
Oh trust me when I say that I know all too well how badly the <50 generation in Italy eat – mostly a sad dinner of sofficini (a sad form of chicken kiev).
However the older generations really know their food, and by that I don't necessarily mean confit duck or lasagne; I mean simple food made well, of the kind the older generations are more attuned to. This cuts across national borders and does not have to be expensive. Indeed some of the best food is made using cheap ingredients.
To quench yours and Baxx's thirst for anorak stories, a look at city sketches of the mid Early Modern period will show you how many pubs you would find on any given street in the UK.
This was the case in most towns of northern Europe. The reason for this was that beer was a staple food. People would spend hours every day sitting in the pub. It accounted for a large part of people's diets.
The beer was low in alcohol so it could be drunk in large quantities. The New World discovery of the potato and the eventual success in its cultivation ended Europe's dependence on beer.
I suggest the PM try watching ‘Rick Stein’s Food Heroes’ as well if he’d like to see how appetising English food can be.
And by now I’ve seen works of fiction in a fantasy setting that deal with the positive legacies of cultural interaction due to colonialism with more nuance and realism than Muscat’s abysmal assessment. A sad klutz indeed.
And as to Maltese food, I do think there’s a British influence too. Talk about pies, and cakes.. they’re all British.
[Daphne – There are no cakes in Maltese cuisine. There couldn’t have been, because people didn’t have ovens at home and used the baker’s. I’d have liked to see anybody try taking his tin of batter to Joey tal-Hobz and persuading him to check it with a skewer as it rises gently at such and such a temperature. You couldn’t cook most cakes in an oven like that anyway. The cakes Maltese people cook are not Maltese with a British influence. They are 100% British. If Maltese people begin regularly cooking Peking duck, this does not make Peking duck ‘Maltese cuisine’.
The notion of pastries and other such confections is also not Maltese – it is 100% Sicilian. Well into the 20th century, the only pastry-shops in Malta were in Valletta and owned by the descendants of the Sicilians who set them up in the 19th century or early 20th century. Then a couple of those descendants set up for business in Hamrun. Then the inevitable happened and more pastry-shops opened, taking Sicilian recipes perfected over centuries and massacring them into things like small cannonballs dyed shocking pink with electric food colouring packed with E numbers and liberally coated in dessicated coconut, or hard lumps of pastry filled with rock solid stuff bearing a passing resemblance to chocolate.
Gozo knew no pastries, cakes or desserts at all – absolutely none. There was no tradition of making sweet things in Gozo kitchens, historically. Traditional Maltese ‘sweets’ can’t be very traditional at all when they use British treacle. Of course, they were traditionally made with honey or its by-products, but refer back to what I wrote about the determination of Maltese cooks to substitute the good and proper ingredient with a cheaper one that is completely different and changes the nature of the recipe entirely, as with sauces made with corned beef instead of proper meat.]
Yuck corned beef. It used to be a staple in the’70s when we couldn’t get much on our table thanks to Mintoff. Don’t think I’ve touched the stuff in 30 years.
It was a staple well into the 80s. Yuck, as you put it. It’s still a staple in 2014. Quadruple yuck.
I’ve no doubt I’ll be carried away by some common little cancer, and scientists will determine the cause to be the crap I ate in my childhood. Sorry, I meant “the excellent Maltese food I ate”.
But the corned beef pie, is quintessentially British – in fact you’d also find it on the BBC Good Food website! So you’re right, not Maltese but adopted as part of the Maltese “food”.
I really love corned beef what ever people say.
With tomatoes a bit of lettuce and some health olive oil
When I was growing up in the 80s, we didn’t even have olive oil. Maltese food is soooo Mediterranean, innit?
[Daphne – That’s right. Thanks for reminding me about this. Maltese food is so Mediterranean that nobody in Malta used olive oil and not very many knew what it was until just a few years ago. For the first 30 years of my life, all the hobz biz-zejt I encountered, whether it was made in bars or in homes, was made with vegetable oil or corn oil. That’s not strictly true: for the first 10 years of my life it was made with oddly-coloured oil of unknown provenance poured into recycled wine or whisky bottles at the grocer’s and collected against the weekly government ration card.]
You’re welcome, but really, do I have to remind anyone? Most of your readers here seem to have memories that start at 2003 or thereabouts.
I remember the time before that, and I remember the Dark Ages further back, every painful detail of it. And it’s personal. When I read comments about how Maltese food has been Mediterranean since time immemorial (or about massive World Cup street parties in 1986), it insults my intelligence. It’s tantamout to being called a liar.
So, to recap: When I was growing up, there was nothing remotely nonna Siciliana/Mediterranean about Maltese food.
There was no olive oil.
The only wine we had was Lachryma Vitis. Heaving.
The pasta was made in Malta and awful.
There were only two kinds of cheese: factory-made processed cheese (so-called “Romano” – never was anything so wrongly named) and MMU ricotta. Gbejniet were something of a rarity, if you could get them.
“Fresh” fish was a rarity.
Corned beef was everywhere. Luncheon meat too.
Hobz bil-bloody zejt was doused in the oil drained from cans of tuna.
Shocking? It was.
I could go on. We had no yoghurt. Even deprived children growing up in Romania had it. There was only one kind of tea (Tower Tea) and it tasted like cardboard. There were no breakfast cereals. There was just Comforto coffee and it tasted like the strainings from the Devil’s jockstrap.
Then you brushed your teeth with gritty Pepsodent, said your prayers, and went to bed, in your happy Mediterranean dream-world. For you were Maltese, one of the Chosen People.
Well you could find the use of olive oil a re-discovery of sorts. It was nigh on impossible to find olive oil in Malta after 1800 because one of the first things the British saw to was the uprooting of olive trees and any other trees that could have impeded the defence of the fortress island.
[Daphne – Another of the usual anti-British myths that isn’t tested against the facts or even examined in rational thought. Why would ‘the British’ have razed all the olive trees in the Maltese islands? To what end and purpose? How do olive trees “impede the defence of the fortress island”? And in that case, why would they have razed the olive trees on Gozo, when Gozo was not defended at all? There were no olive trees there either before a couple of decades ago.
The notion of a Malta covered in olive groves before 1800 is a piece of fiction. Though there are plenty of descriptions of the islands over the centuries, none of them mention notable olive groves or olive oil production. The scout sent by the Order of St John to examine the island before they decamped here described the place as a barren rock with Africans living in huts and caves. That was in the 16th century.
There is no record, archaeological or written, of commercial olive oil production beyond the Roman era. There wouldn’t have been any, because there wasn’t the population to sustain it either in terms of labour or consumption. And when the population grew post the 1500s, Malta imported its olive oil from Sicily.
In a barren land with absolutely no source of cooking-fuel beyond ephemeral thistles, you don’t need much imagination to work out what happened to any olive trees there might have been once nobody was bothering to make olive oil anymore.
Orange trees survived because they were in private gardens, not open groves, and because people needed the fruit to fend off scurvy. Otherwise they would have been cut down for firewood too. ]
Albona, you’re trying to argue with me, when I’ve made a special study of the subject. Honestly.
Daphne is right, but I can add more. The first written records for the actual foodstuffs consumed in Malta date from the latter half of the 13th century. And guess what? Malta was importing olive oil. And wine too.
Of course you won’t get this in Grajjet Malta because it demolishes the pretty myth of a poplu hawtiel basking in the Mediterranean sun and cultivating its olive groves and vineyards.
Just for the record, people used to take their pies or bakes to the local baker to be cooked in its wood-fired ovens. I know many people who used to do this.
[Daphne – Yes, albona, everybody knows that. How else would Maltese people have eaten roast food when they had no ovens at home? BUT NOT CAKES. Unlike whole roast onions, dixx patata jew bicca majjal, cakes are chemistry. And before the national pride brigade pounce on me to say that of course people had ovens in Malta, NO THEY DID NOT. I actually remember the time when people in villages and towns that were not Sliema put their newly acquired ‘cooker bil-forn’ in the front room or hallway, where it could be seen from the street, for the festa tar-rahal. I actually thought at one point in my childhood that in this very different Malta, people cooked near the front door.]
Jien niftakar ukoll meta kont għandi tfal, li kellna l-ispiritiera Valor u ommi kienet taħmi kejk fil-borma forn, jew inkella ma nafx hux aktar tard jew qabel (iktar naħseb qabel) kellna forn taż-żingu li ommi kienet tpoġġih fuq żewġ spiritieri tal-ftila (bi tnejn jew bi tlieta) u kienet tagħmel l-għaġin jew ross il-forn u kultant anke xi qarabagħli jew brunġiel il-forn.
Imma kont trid tibda minn sbieħ Alla biex sa nofsinhar isir u tiekol. U lin-nanna niftakarha tagħmel tliet borom fuq xulxin fuq spiritiera tal-ftila. Kellha l-minestra fl-ewwel borma kbira biex titma’ ma nafx kemm nies, fuq l-għatu tagħha tpoġġi borma oħra bl-ilma biex meta jisħon tużah biex taħsel il-platti u fuq l-għatu tat-tieni borma tpoġġi kitla bl-ilma biex jisħon għall-kafe jew te. (Kien jilħqilha n-nanna). U xi ngħidu għall-qrieqeċ (xaħam maħlul biex isajru bih – mela żejt taż-żebbuġa!) u jibqa’ l-qrieqeċ u jitfgħhuhom flok kapuljat, u s-saqajn tal-majjal melħin. Dan kien l-ikel Malti Mediterranju?
[Daphne – Three large pots, all containing boiling water, stacked on each other on a small spiritiera: a disaster waiting to happen, and a wonder nobody ended up scalded and in hospital. But perhaps they did. The way people lived – I have no truck with nostalgia.]
But this is it, we just do not have a clue to the importance of selecting the right ingredients and passing on our passion to the process.
The same with everything else – just look at the hotch-potch in architecture, the wrong proportions, hideous colour combinations, copied from somewhere but a shade lurid, off-the-shelf fittings, usually alien and cheap, and try to make do with the result.
Ever seen the latest craze on shopping TV? Umpteen aggressive women selling rows and rows of the same ‘fashionable’ styles, and they just have to go through each and every top, skirt, shirt, a good two seconds reserved per item. What seems to matter is having a more vast selection than the one on the other channel.
Call it cultural hunger mistaken for material wants. There are two ways to beat the corned beef cult: one is to remove it from the idea of exotic, read the real thing; another is to award dignity to the idea of cucina povera, which does away with corned beef and the fake treat it represents.
Both methods require mental discipline AND a total dedication to the art. Because that’s what we lack – signs of a people who just don’t respect themselves let alone each other. Taste, after all, is just that. Good taste is healthy society.
What we have at the moment is the pretentious making-do with whatever was left over from the officer’s mess.
Thus the humunguous ‘pasti’ covered in Smarties, with brown concrete mixed with passolina.
Caffe Cordina has been doing the suffle’ Malti for years.
[Daphne – Maltese ‘soufle’ is actually nothing more than the classic English trifle. In no way is it even remotely Maltese, nor are its component ingredients. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifle ]
Oh yes, Cordina. The world-renowned oldest café in Malta, where sandwiches are made from sliced supermarket bread and pre-sliced cheese and a bit of tomato, where you have to get a chit for an item from the front desk manned by a fat lady, as if it were a school canteen, and where the espresso is simply dire.
How many Michelin-starred restaurants are there in the UK?
How many in the “Mediterranean”? Or in Malta for that matter? (A grand total of zero)
I rest my case. Not that “Jo” would understand.
Are we talking about food or about restaurants?
So what if Mrs.C.G. had her best Italian meal in London.
But it must have been an Italian restaurant.
England especially London boasts of the best restaurants in the world, but how many of them serve typical English food?
[Daphne – Quite a few, actually, Mr Loporto. Times have changed, you know. Typically English food is very fashionable nowadays and has been for some time.]
I agree with you, when we come to Maltese food, it’s nothing but crap, especially in Gozo – I never managed to get a good meal in Gozo, nothing but rubbish.
As Daphne says, it’s all about the ingredients and knowing how to handle them.
In Gozo, I have tasted the best freshly prepared lobster I’ve ever had – prepared with a simple red onion and a glass of red wine. Far superior to the same nature of fare that I’ve had in the south of France.
In Gozo, I have tasted the best “gidi,” prepared and cooked by the same person.
Simple fare at its best. Seasonal variations still unseen by the Maltese onlooker or visitor.
Canned food, to me, represents what is required for a nuclear bunker – changed every 6 months due to expiry date regulations and still unused.
Even the water that goes into the growing of fresh produce should be scrutinised.
For me, the best fare is had in home cooking. The herb garden the starting point according to the household or guest “barometer.” I’ve come to loath the low standards generally available in restaurants and tend to avoid eating out, where possible.
There are always remarkable exceptions, and in those cases the nature of the service tends to match the quality of the food. There is as much thought dedicated to the atmosphere and ambiance the food is enjoyed in as to the preparation of the ingredients for the meal. As it should be.
It depends on what you define as including the Mediterranean. Spain, Portugal, France and Italy have a sizeable number of Michelin star restaurants.
Also: if we are going to judge by the Michelin guide, ‘English’ cooking still has some way to go – 3 of 4 of the UK 3-star restaurants and a sizeable number of the 2-star establishments serve French cuisine.
Having said this, the idea that a sitting Prime Minister of Malta would make a cheap joke about English food while giving a speech at the LSE makes me really want to run for the hills.
Such remarks are a) rude, and therefore a violation of diplomatic protocol and b) ill-advised. I can’t imagine the hissy-fit that would result if Prime Minister Cameron visited Malta and started making jokes about the state of many of the things (and people) he sees.
Sorry Baxxter, but there are at least 2 Michelin starred restaurants in Sicily. The two I know of are La Madia in Licata and Ristorante Duomo in Ibla. I am sure there are others in Palermo and Catania.
Daphne, is it expected to leave tips when there is a service charge and if yes, what is the right amount? This part of dining gives me so much anxiety, believe it or not. Thanks.
[Daphne – If there is a service charge, you don’t leave a tip. Maltese restaurants don’t include a service charge, so leave 10 per cent. If the waiter was rude or unhelpful, as is often the case, make a point of leaving nothing. All London restaurants include a service charge of around 15%, so no need to leave a tip – but you are within your rights in asking to have the service charge deducted if you weren’t happy with the service. Lots of Italian restaurants tack on a service charge as standard – so ditto, no tip. In New York, waiting staff often work for tips alone and the tips from ‘their’ tables go directly to them and not into the communal kitty. Those tips are their wages, so heavy tips are expected – a minimum of 20%. If you are a large party and have been particularly demanding on the restaurant staff’s time and attention, as large parties generally are, leave a tip of 15%, not 10%.]
Service charge is not a tip! You get a very low basic salary and the 15% are part of your taxable earnings. While studying in Paris, I worked for two years as a waitress. In one place the service charge never reached us, it was pocketed by the restaurant owner and our meagre wage was paid by the hour, irrespective of how much was actually sold. In both places I was regularly tipped and heavily dependent on the generosity of the patrons.
[Daphne – Oh yes, I forgot to point that out, thank you. You can deduct the service charge from your bill and give it straight to the waiter in cash, in Britain, if you think it won’t reach him otherwise, because the service charge is meant for him. However, you are most certainly not expected to tip over and above the service charge. In British restaurants where there is no service charge, this is pointed out on the bill with a suggestion that you leave a tip at your discretion instead.]
I’m not that stupid, you know. I knew there are a few Michelin-starred restaurants in Sicily. But it’s two or three against dozens in the UK. So our Jo is indeed a prat.
And it’s dozens in the UK against zero in Malta, so our Jo is not just a prat but a giant tosser.
The closest we get is De Mondion at the Xara Palace. In time, they may get their Michelin star. But their food is as far away from “traditional Maltese” as you can get. And that’s the whole point.
Michelin stars require refinement – not bumfluffery, but refinement. The less contrived the food, the better.
It is perfectly possible to win your Michelin star serving bread and butter – and the latest trend in French ultre-haute cuisine is precisely that – but it’s all in the excellence of the ingredients and the things left unspoken.
You know, like a silent eyebrow conversation with Ritienne. Most Maltese “fine” cuisine is – how shall I put it? – too bloody obvious. It’s very 1990s.
Remember this?
http://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2009/03/oh-grow-up-joseph-muscat/
I think New York gives London a run for its money when it comes to food quality.
[Daphne – Yes, it’s very similar, but London is more varied and I’m trying to keep the focus on Europe, as that is our context.]
Checkmate, Mr. Minister?
http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2014-07-23/news/pn-ready-to-postpone-parliament-holidays-to-debate-farrugia-sacco-impeachment-motion-5944868865/
I also live in Scotland – you forgot the haggis.
I cannot understand why our PM insists on insulting his hosts. I also think that the very people who always comment “M’hawnx ahjar min Malta” are the very ones who tend to make life intolerable on our little rock/pebble.
[Daphne – I don’t like haggis. I tend not to eat anything that involves innards or offal, except for steak and kidney pie. One of my grandfathers used to make a fantastic one and I still love it.]
Apparently, offal is the new Michelin reviewers’ favourite. A return to cooking for sustenance and living off the land, as it were.
[Daphne – Yes, offal restaurants and offal cookbooks, and even there London has one of the best: St John on Commercial Street.]
It’s very much an acquired taste. Of course, I’m used to it, having had to stomach a lot of tripe from our leaders.
Two weeks ago, I was in Scotland and was pleasantly surprised that I found that haggis can be a pleasure.
I love haggis with mashed potatoes and boiled carrots.
I think briefly fried liver with garlic and sage makes exceptionally tasty offal.
So many better dishes then haggis in Scotland.
I love venison, served with some black pudding, fresh from deer in Angus..
Try liver with juniper berries, gin and mustard.
Try tongue stewed in Madeira with shallots and raisins or plain boiled with salsa verde or Maltese zalza pikkanti.
[Daphne – The reasons I don’t eat offal and innards, except bits of kidney occasionally, have nothing to do with either the taste or the recipe. It’s simply a personal food taboo.]
The ability to cook meals using the freshest of ingredients is something that our stupid Prime Minister doesn’t understand.
Basic stuff like fresh herbs are not available in Malta, and those tubs you buy from supermarkets are half dry anyway.
When you walk into a fish shop over here, you instantly smell that fishy smell. Fresh fish should smell of nothing. Only rotting fish smells fishy.
The prime minister judges English food as though it was only fish and chips (which are lovely anyway, if you get them at a good chippy), and beans on toast (equally lovely).
It’s like saying Maltese cuisine is pastizzi and hobz biz-zejt. He’s clearly never been to one of the few Maltese cuisine restaurants over here. And he’s clearly never been to the only Maltese cafe in London which doesn’t do any justice to Maltese cuisine at all.
What a prat, honestly. Is-selid ta’ Michelle mela, u s-soppa ta l-armla li taghmillu.
Muscat was and is a much-adored only son who married young and never left his parents’ back yard.
What are the chances he’s ever done his own food shopping and cooking?
His shape tells us what we need to know about his taste in food. He himself had said that he prefers eating hamburgers when he didn’t turn up to a state dinner in honour of outgoing president Fenech Adami.
Yes indeed, unfortunately, many a kitchen has mushroomed and sprawled on our Island, but few, very few are the restarurants. Good ones can be counted on the palm of the hand especially the ones where the waiter`s thumb tastes the fare before the guest does.
Anglo-Saxon work ethic in Malta. You must be joking, Joseph.
His own Anglo-Saxon work ethic included pulling an EU salary and perks, as he wrote his thesis for his PhD, while warming the EP benches.
I can’t imagine all this drivel written by a professional like Leslie Skipper. The PM must have ’embellished’ the original text with his own ideas.
Most probably you are right. He first employs a consultant, but then he thinks he knows best and colours the speech with his brilliant ideas, only to uncover how backward his mentality is.
In short, and it can be said only in Maltese:
‘Pastaż u injorant’
Of course he did. He had to show off his ‘British humour’.
I applied under a scheme promoted by the Lands Department and paid money up front. After two years of their impeccable Anglo-Saxon work ethic, I have heard nothing from them. They are probably always out to lunch doing the Mediterranean lifestyle thingie.
Is Joey’s script writer Skinner or Spinner?
I cannot agree more. British food as gone through an incredible revival. London is the food capital of the world and even in villages, pubs have taken what were ‘British classics’ into something spectacular.
All you need to do is go to the areas like Kent or Cornwall to mention a few examples.
Shopping at English food markets (and again not only in London) is a joy and that is the benchmark by which a country should be measured. I shudder whenever I am in Malta at the so called quality in most restaurants and supermarkets.
Unfortunately we seem to think of Malta and the Maltese as the centre of the world when it comes to everything. When it comes to food, unfortunately, we still have a lot to learn. The problem is that we do not have the humility to understand this.
Do you realise what he’s doing?
Inviting us to try Chinese food? What is he doing? Do tell us.
Availing himself of the reason of state.
The battle of superlatives indeed.
He did say once that he preferred burgers to state dinners. What a wa**ker.
His attempts at humour are so pathetic.
Let’s not forget that Joseph manages to insult every single one of his neighbours in this fantastic quip. But he said he wouldn’t be diplomatic, so that’s ok. It’s because he’s 40 and European. This, apparently, is very, very cool.
Bloody hell, the Prime Minister of Malta acts like the drunk uncle that couldn’t NOT be invited to the family wedding.
The ignorant tub of lard is a national embarrassment, and his speech writer is clearly well out of sync with his country of birth.
U ijwa, l-Inglizi mhux f’xi ‘fish & chips’ jifhmu? How fed up are we of hearing that claptrap, normally uttered by someone who spends his week away in Marsalforn, or maybe stretches himself to a weekend in Catania’s markets.
First sentence. BIG LAJK!!!
I agree that that the ignorant tub of lard is a national embarrassment.
However that the ‘fish and chips’ jibe is used solely by Maltese people is an overstatement.
I worked at a number of international organisations including highly reputable German and Austrian ones and can assure you that that the multinational senior staff of the organisation always brought this jibe up to tease the English during our entertaining dinners.
Surprise, surprise, Maltese restaurants and food were among the top of their preference.
[Daphne – Come off it. Please. Anybody who ranks Maltese restaurants and food ‘among the top of their preference’ has never been anywhere else much. There are a few decent restaurants, yes, but to rank them as world-beating is ridiculous. As for the Austrians and Germans teasing the English about fish and chips, no doubt they got the standard bratwurst and sauerkraut response. So you see…]
Do you think maybe it was among the top of their preference because they happened to be talking to a Maltese person? I mean, you have to talk about something.
Also, the jibes you mention are the effect of national stereotypes. The French are snobs, the Italians cowardly, the Germans robotic, the Scottish drunks and the English have bad food.
What usually happens is that people travel and see that most of these are a caricature, and that actually, look, the Scottish aren’t all drunk, some are even out hillwalking, the Germans ask if you’re lost and give directions, the French ask you where you’re from and if you avoid rubbish pubs and greasy spoons most of the food is pretty good to downright excellent in England.
Of course London may be the world capital with fabulously good restaurants with every cuisine imaginable but in the vast majority not serving English cuisine, except for some excellent roasts.
To trash Italy, or Sicily for that matter, for their cooking, is equal to Muscat’s stupidity. Great cooking in different regions with fresh ingredients – and not air lifted to London.
[Daphne – Which is my point exactly about English food. I did not ‘trash Italy’ (Sicily is part of it). I merely pointed out that you have to hunt down the good to excellent restaurants because the rest are just indifferent and even, surprise surprise, downright bad. The more tourists there are around, the worse the restaurants tend to be – which is terribly short-sighted (‘fleece them and feed them rubbish as we will never see them again anyway’). You don’t have to hunt down the good restaurants in London – they are literally everywhere. And incidentally, I have some pretty strong opinions on Italian food and Italian food culture in general: like pretty much everything else in Italy except industrial design, it’s totally fossilised. ‘These recipes have served us for centuries exactly as they are, so no need to get creative any longer’. There are notable exceptions, but they’re the swallows that don’t make a summer. And quite frankly, the whole world isn’t necessarily enamoured of 1001 versions of pasta.]
You cannot seriously compare the food in say, Tuscany, to the food in England. They use so many simple, fresh, local ingredients, and while their pasta dishes really are the best in the world, they offer so much more than that. The way they cook vegetables alone is impressive. The English tend to overcook everything, their meat, their vegetables and especially their pasta. They are excellent at pies and stews though.
[Daphne – Here we go again. Where did you learn that the English tend to overcook everything, Matt? At your nanna’s knee in 1970? Name some simple and fresh ‘local ingredients’ used in Tuscany. Go on.
Now name some simple and fresh ‘local ingredients used in the various regions of Britain.
You get cinghiale in Britain too, you know. The only difference is that there it’s called boar and comes from Scotland.]
London really does offer some of the best restaurants in the world, but that’s primarily because you cannot in all seriousness compare English food to the food you find in London.
You’ll find the best Italian, Asian and French restaurants there. English cuisine just isn’t really the main cuisine in London. Not to mention the ridiculously huge amount of ‘tourist’ restaurants.
In large cities in Italy you can get by without knowing of good restaurants beforehand, something you definitely can’t do in London, or any other part of the U.K. for that matter.
[Daphne – No, Matt, it’s actually the other way round. It’s the large cities of Italy that are packed with lousy tourist-trap restaurants serving rubbish. And it’s in the large cities of Italy that you are hard pushed to find properly good restaurants among the sea of average of indifferent ones and the tourist traps. There are practically no ‘tourist restaurants’ in London beyond those which are immediately recognisable as such because of they are chains. A chain is a chain is a chain. You can walk into any non-chain restaurant in London and eat very well. London rents are so ridiculous high that there is no way on earth any restaurant is going to survive let alone do well unless it is rave-reviewed and packed out by word-of-mouth patrons.]
Roasts
‘Manners maketh man’, dear Prime Minister.
And let’s not forget, the criticism of English cuisine comes from somebody, who effed off an official invitation to a state banquet, in honour President Fenech Adami, in order to go out for a burger with another couple of Labour ignoramuses.
As an Old Aloysian our PM should be familiar with the “Manners maketh man” saying. A long-gone Prefect of Discipline at the college used to follow up that with: “Bad manners maketh savages.”
I love this photo. It depicts him perfectly. A stupid arrogant idiot.
Hereford steaks cheaper than any steaks in Malta, salt marsh lamb, fish pies which Malta can only dream of. You name it. I panic when I am hungry out in Malta because I know I will be robbed blind and get some really shitty food.
I can rant about this till the sun comes up. It is literally my daily torture.
This commentary takes all as far as I am concerned. I see that someone knows the reality of food in Malta.
@DCG
Beg to differ on this point. “Some Maltese food can be really bad, but Maltese cooking tends to be worse, for instance.”
And I kindly ask you, what ‘style’ of typical Maltese cooking are you referring to? Typical Maltese dishes have, and are still fairly simple to cook using natural ingredients through our two seasons.
[Daphne – You will be amazed at how regularly and with what studied determination typical Maltese dishes that should be fairly simple to cook are massacred in Maltese kitchens by people who actually believe that theirs is the improved version. ‘Tomato’ sauce made with just kunserva, water and semolina? Mqarrun fil-forn made with corned beef? Ross fil-forn ‘improved’ by the addition of a layer of ravioli baking on top? Vegetable soup made by boiling chopped vegetables? Tinned tomatoes used instead of fresh tomatoes in summer? Fish soup with no fish in it, ghax dak hela u ghalfejn? Or my pet hate: BEEF OLIVES – bits of canga tal-friza complete with gristly bits and gag-making veins and tendons, wrapped round whatever the cook found in the fridge or cupboard of tins (corned beef again, anyone?) and pierced with toothpicks. Lovely. I could go on, but won’t.]
Adding to the above, your comments on “The best Italian food I have ever eaten wasn’t anywhere in Italy”.
…Read your own previously ‘Taste’ & newly incorporated ‘Taste & Flair’ magazines (Never missed a monthly edition of these mags).
Are you in your senses, or are you not? You seem to be quite contradictory at times… Ta’ thawwid Daph.
[Daphne – How rude you are. My magazines contain no restaurant reviews and yes, the best Italian restaurant I have been to is in London, not Italy. Good restaurants are not composed only of good food. Your interest in these matters is such that you haven’t even bothered to ask me which one it is. A person truly interested in food would have done so. No, I am not contradictory. I am consistent in refusing to repeat or accept the received wisdom if I know through experience that it is untrue or wholly or partially incorrect. The fact is that some of the most appalling meals I have eaten have been in various parts of Italy – because that’s what happens when people rest on their laurels. Their standards slip and they find they have been outrun by others. And I’m sorry, but the days when slapping plates of food down on the table in the way ‘nonna’ cooked it was thought part of the local charm are long, long gone.]
Some of the worst meals I have had in my life I’ve had in Italy.
Me too
Vera l kaz ta ‘fools rush in, where angels fear to tread’. And he thinks he’s being cool by taking the mickey.
Mur ghidlu li qed iwaqqa isem Malta
Daphne,
I am very disappointed. To quote English food as the best shows a total lack of culinary knowledge – me being a very keen cook myself. The Maltese cuisine, well cooked and presented, will surpass English food by far.
[Daphne – You know perfectly well that I don’t have “a total lack of culinary knowledge”. No, Maltese cuisine, well cooked and well presented, does not surpass English food that is well cooked and well presented, let alone by far. It certainly does not surpass Scottish food. Most Maltese recipes are based on the principle of making the most of poor or indifferent ingredients. When better ingredients are available, that sort of complication really isn’t necessary. I prefer the kind of cooking that is based on the principle of letting exceptional ingredients speak for themselves. There is a reason why you would never do anything much to a really good piece of beef. ‘Keep it simple’.]
Sammut, even on those topics he purports to comprehend, writes rubbish.
Another point: I really don’t give two hoots about this English food “issue”. It’s the postponement of local council elections by FOUR YEARS – clearly the aim is to scupper the hunting referendum.
And where is Simon Busuttil on this issue? He did criticize it in parliament. That’s it. Let’s move on.
Do you recall the pandemonium Labour created over car registration tax? A never-ending campaign.
Sssssh Dr Busuttil is having his afternoon siesta.
He is simply not fit for purpose to lead the Nationalist Party.
You definitely put in more of your time criticising the government than does Dr Busuttil.
Rant over.
“You definitely put in more of your time criticising the government than does Dr Busuttil.”
You are wrong. It is the medium that accounts for the difference and not the time.
People read Daphne willingly but are reluctant to watch the news or hear parliament recordings to see what Simon Busuttil is saying.
One other Maltese food myth, Maltese bread. To start with the traditional loaf was decent, nothing particularly great compared with other similar loafs available in other countries usually sold as rustic loafs.
On the other hand we had the ftira. That was special, and like the French baguette it had a very short shelf life.
So what did the hard working Maltese do. Did we find ways how to equip ourselves to make sure that everyone could enjoy the aromatic freshness of the ftira? No instead we started to produce a ftira using the same dough out of which today we produce the new sort of hobza tal-Malti. I have not had a proper ftira for some 8 years.
Leaving the fish and chips aside, why may I ask did our intrepid PM suggest more sanctions on Russia, when President Obama himself has said that there is no proof that Russia was directly involved in the Malaysian air crash? Does Joseph Muscat cosy up to David Cameron and share secrets with him behind our backs?
The food at the Muscat family home must be splendid.
Suwp u naq’a selitt
In your defence of British food you forgot to tell us how many British people afford to eat out at these fabulous London restaurants day in day out.
That’s right. The rest are stuck with Pret sandwiches and Tesco rubbish for dinner.
[Daphne – Huge numbers. Restaurants of all types are jam-packed every night and everybody in them seems to be either British or living in London. The restaurants are not ‘fabulous’ – London is not Dubai. There are expensive restaurants and inexpensive restaurants and lots in between, and the point is that whatever your price range, you can eat something really good in very pleasant surroundings and with excellent service by civilised, polite people. And you’re happy paying teh bill in a way that you rarely are in Malta.]
Sorry Ms Caruana Galizia but taking the cave out of the man is not possible.
His culinary expertise is focused in one area only: iced buns, and in fact here is one of his latest creations…
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140723/local/Julia-Farrugia-lands-role-at-Project-Malta.528853
Of course he will not be competing on Chopped any time soon because the kitchen ambiance around his creations are always eybrow raising, just ruminate over the quote below. Half baked, shoddy execution, bitter aftertaste ensues.
“The organisational structure of Project Malta has not been decided yet, but what I can tell you is that Ms Farrugia was doing some ground work for this new entity,” the spokesman said in reply to further questioning.
He added that he was not in a position to say who would be heading this organisation.
”I will ask her but I have my doubt whether the roles at Project Malta have already been defined.”
My dear mother always told us “l-inglizi ma jafux jieklu”.
This is what I believed until that fateful day, well over half a century ago, when I was introduced to Harrod’s Food Hall and Fortnum and Mason.
Later I had the pleasure to visit Billingsgate and Smithfield’s.
The Suq Tal-Belt should have been boarded up by the health authorities centuries ago.
An Italian friend who I took round the Valletta market fifty years ago remarked “allora qui mangiate solo merda”.
One of the biggest fruit merchants in Catania province told me way back in 1976 : “A Malta vendo tutto quello che mi e’ impossibile vendere altrove in Europa. Tutta roba da porcile”.
In Malta, as a general rule, we eat “gaxxin”.
That is compared to the quality and variety of food that is available in Britain.
If you want to eat the best fish ever, head to Oban, Scotland, to fisherman wharf.
Beg to differ: Sju Skepp, Naset, just outside Goteborg, Sweden
Ranker website in the USA has the following ten world’s best cities to eat well (of course seen through US lenses):
1. San Francisco
2. Paris
3. New Orleans
4. Rome
5. Los Angeles
6. New York
7. Barcelona
8. Chicago
9. San Diego
10. Florence
[Daphne – This is so American. The standard cities at home and their go-to cities in Europe: Florence (beloved of Americans), Rome (ditto) and Paris (ditto). In reality, restaurants in Florence and Rome range from the mediocre to absolute disasters unless you really know where to go. The idea of the ‘tourist restaurant’ still exists there, which is peculiar as London and New York get far more tourism and don’t have that kind of thing.]
No mention of Charlie l-Barri tal-Mgarr, Malta?
Is the quality of food in a country judged by what one can eat in a restaurant, or by what is normally eaten in the average home?
[Daphne – By both, because the one is directly related to the other. You will never find excellent restaurants in places where people know little about food, and where they eat rubbish at home and so are content with slightly better rubbish in restaurants. If restaurants are generally bad or indifferent, you can safely assume that the food people are eating at home is even worse.]
Shock twist:
Both English as well as Maltese food is excellent if done well with good ingredients.
There is no such thing as ‘Maltese food’.
Has anyone watched the clip of Muscat’s meeting with Cameron screened on TVM ?. His body language is atrocious, a clear indicator of a very poor upbringing that will follow him to the grave even after ten years as a prime minister.
What the hell is he on about! Maltese cuisine, if there’s such a thing, is highly influenced by British cuisine.
[Daphne – Maltese cooking is not at all influenced by British cooking. Maltese food choices and some ingredients are.]
The potatoes that feature in many dishes, all the pies, the creams and butter, the trifles and custard, the whisky we serve to our guests, the fried lampuki (instead of cod) in batter, the Sunday pork roast! From where do these come from? Other then from dear old Blighty.
[Daphne – Potatoes feature in the cooking and recipes of every country in Europe. The British introduced potatoes here as a cash crop to feed the troops, that’s true, but the Maltese would have ended up eating potatoes anyway, just as everyone else does who wasn’t colonised by the British. Maltese pies are nothing like British pies, and the pies you find in coffee-shops, which are probably mass produced by pie-elves in some Maltese pie factory, are not pies at all but shells of toughed dough with something dry and unpleasant inside, generally featuring corned beef (which in Britain is emergency or camping rations and not standard fare). People do not eat butter in Malta; they eat margerine or those yellow spreads that come in tubs. They don’t use real cream either, but the stuff that comes in tins or worse, the stuff that comes in spray cans. Yes, Maltese trifle is actually English trifle. We serve whisky because unlike other countries in Europe, we don’t distill our own alcohol. Lampuki are not fried in batter; they are lightly floured before being fried, and this in chunks that include the bone. Cod in batter is filleted. The Sunday roast in Britain is beef, not pork. Any other anorak comments are welcome.]
However, although I agree with you that the Maltese diet is crap, the British one is just as bad. Indeed, the Maltese and British populations are the two most fat in Europe.
[Daphne – Wrong again. British people are lean and trim. Only members of the underclass are fat or obese.]
UK among worst in western Europe for level of overweight and obese people
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/may/29/uk-western-europe-obesity-study
[Daphne – Unfortunately, that survey doesn’t break down the results according to socio-educational background and level of affluence. You can spend whole days walking around England and not see a single fat or obese person until you move into a less affluent area or council estate. Even portly bankers are a thing of the past. In Malta it tends to be linked to socio-educational background (though not level of affluence) too, but we’re not allowed to say that in public. Given that I know your identity, exactly how many fat or obese people do you know among your extended social network? I know very few.]
I’m not sure on the lean and trim, I’ve seen surveys showing otherwise, the working class, or under class as you define it (if you are implying so) is the predominant class.
[Daphne – Why bother with surveys if, as you say, you live there? The underclass is not the predominant class. And it is distinct from the working-class. That is why it is the underclass. It is not my definition: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/underclass%5D
The English themselves still like to joke about poor English food, even if they know things have changed, in a form of self-deprecating humour.
But while it can be funny when they do that in the right context, it just feels stupid and crass when someone else does.
Maybe he was thinking of the days when a Labour government set up a scheme to import tinned food in bulk: corned beef, luncheon meat, ham, tuna, milk.
Without wanting you to take any offence, I feel that in order to prove that the PM made a fool of himself there is no need to rubbish Maltese food. There is good food in Malta as there is crap like everywhere. Traditional Maltese food is good and healthy and deserves praise.
[Daphne – Actually, c, traditional Maltese food is wholly unexceptional, unimaginative and uncreative. And quite frankly, that figures. Also, the only truly traditional Maltese food is lumps of bread, foraged snails and vegetables boiled in water and called minestra. Only the very privileged by Maltese standards could afford to eat anything else.]
Italian and French cuisine certainly have a much better reputation than British cuisine. In any case it would be boring to eat just fish and chips.
[Daphne – Just like the prime minister, you are uninformed and out of date.]
Many reasons are behind Britains’ bad culinary reputation. A major one is the replacement ingredients that were used in the WWII due to shortages which post-war found themselves into daily cooking. Another major problem with the Brits are ‘standards’ – often low unless one goes to a top-end restaurant (at least, this is the case in London), but it has nothing to do with ‘traditional British food’.
There is nothing wrong with Fish n Chips, if you happen to come across a good outlet.
“In any case it would be boring to eat just fish and chips”
Do you actually read what you write, David? Or any of the other comments and responses? You’re simply perpetuating the ignorance here.
First off, good quality fish and chips as they should be prepared (you can’t get them anywhere in Malta) are a delight to eat. Absolutely delicious. Secondly, back to the sentence I’ve quoted above – please replace ‘fish and chips’ with any of the following:
Lobster
Pastizzi
Fillet steak
Smoked salmon
Pasta
Hobz biz-zejt
Leg of lamb
Lampuki
Roast beef
Imqarrun
Pizza
Steak & kidney pie
Burgers
Kebabs
Corn flakes
Ross il-forn
Qarabaghli mimli
Do you see where I’m going with this, David?
Maltese are fat as they love to eat. There is a wealth of Maltese dishes, traditional and more modern. I have met many foreigners who when they visited Malta loved Maltese food.
[Daphne – Lucky you, David. But know that visitors are always polite about the food, whether they are tourists speaking to a ‘native’ or guests in your home. It’s simple good manners.
‘Loving to eat’ does not translate into obesity. Too much (bad) food does. ]
Why is this man talking about food? Why can’t he talk about investment instead?
In 18 months of governing this rock not one single investment of note has landed in Malta. The only ‘investment’ that Joseph can boast about is the scandalous €300 million sale of our new power station and its employees with it.
Thank you for this. Growing up in Malta has been insufferable in this regard (as well as in many other aspects). I used to summer in Scotland as a child and the cuisine was simple fare based on the freshest and best of ingredients. Strict instructions from my grandmother on where to buy the food and how to buy it. She would have you running all over the village to get a meal together. Professional butchers and fishmongers, fresh ingredients from surrounding farms, excellent bakeries, fresh vegetables and fruit. And all bought daily. And it was also an extremely healthy diet. Then you came home to abuse from the ‘itfa naqa WOR-chester sauce u iftah landa corn beef’ brigade.
Daphne – I’m suspecting that from your response to Qeghdin Sew, you actually haven’t dined in London restaurants in a long time.
British people eating in jam packed restaurants? Jam packed yes, but vast majority are not British, but London domiciled people, or visitors of all types. The British dining out are the city boys or the upper crust. Certainly not the middle or lower classes, they certainly cannot afford London restaurants, as much as they can no longer afford to live in London.
[Daphne – I’m there frequently and know exactly what I am speaking about. I would, because this is a particular interest of mine. Yes, the restaurants are jam-packed and tables at the best places have to be booked well ahead. The best places are not the ones your average visiting moneyed Maltese thinks are the best places – those are precisely the ones which attract the ‘bling’ crowd. Some of those best places are really simple and you don’t even book – but you wait all the same.]
Good service in London restaurants. You must be joking. All the waitering staff are Eastern European, who have difficulty smiling, even if you physically tickle them!
[Daphne – Not my experience at all. Most of them are working in an environment where they will be fired if they are not perfect or if patrons are annoyed. And most of them, too, have natural good manners – even if they are Eastern European. I find that being charming to waiting staff rather than being highhanded or dismissive works wonders. So perhaps it’s that.]
No one beats Italian waitering staff, who treat their job as a profession and not an in between job. Do you note how many elderly Italian waiters you get in Italian restaurants? It’s because it’s a life long profession which they do with a passion. And you’re going to compare that with a Serbian waiter? Hallina Daphne.
[Daphne – Actually it’s because they have no pension and because they haven’t been able to move up the career ladder. Nobody wants to be a waiter all his life. The fact that you have a lot of old waiters in Italy does not reflect well on that country but rather the opposite.]
Of course there are fabulous restaurants in London, complete with amazing decor. They are sprouting everywhere, to cater for the occupants of London’s new skyline of villa apartments.
And all this hype of Michelin star restaurants. How many times have you paid a few hundred pounds per person and left the place truly satisfied and still not hungry – with silly finger food disguised in hideous sauces. Oh come on Daphne , don’t tell me you are easily impressed by Michelin star chefs.
[Daphne – You and I agree on that, and I am with you all the way. As I have said in replies to other comments, I prefer simply cooked, wonderful ingredients and can’t bear anything overwrought. I am not impressed by Michelin star chef – food is not acrobatics or a performance art.]
Precisely why Italian cooking still comes tops is because they have kept food simple with fresh ingredients. Michelin star cooking is the complete opposite of silly sauces where you can’t taste whatever it is you’re eating. And please don’t tell me that to you, Italian cooking is only about 1001 types of pasta.
[Daphne – Of course not, but if you take the pasta out of Italian cooking, you immediately have a major problem. Cross the border into France and there is no pasta at all – such a relief.]
I really got the feeling that you took a wrong turn in this posting, and you kept on digging with your replies.
[Daphne – Not at all. This is all about debate. And I do wish that people would remember that food, as distinct from tanking up on it, is my actual job. I do know what I’m talking about and have very little truck with the received wisdom about Italian food. Too many Maltese are obsessed with it, have reverential respect for it, and know about precious little else. But even then, they know not very much at all about properly sophisticated Italian food because they’re not really interested in finding out. And I don’t mean you.]
I am no real fan of Italian cuisine so I do not revere it in the same way that most Maltese do. I much prefer French, Cajun, and Arabic cuisine.
And yet, I think it is unfair to say that removing pasta from Italian dishes burdens its cuisine. It is almost tantamount to saying that taking fish and chips or Sunday out of the equation causes problems to English food. Quite the contrary.
[Daphne – Kevin, fish and chips is one integral English dish. Pasta is not one integral Italian dish. It is one Italian ingredient that is used in literally hundreds of Italian dishes. So yes, when you remove pasta from the list of ingredients in Italian cooking, there’s a problem.
It is only in Malta that ‘pasta’ is thought of as a dish rather than as an ingredient. The ignorance makes me cringe when Maltese politicians and Z-list ‘celebrities’ are asked what their favourite dish is and they reply, PASTA. How can pasta be a favourite dish rather than a favourite ingredient? Orecchiette with cime di rapa would be a favourite dish.]
There are several exquisite non-pasta/wheat dishes in Italian food. Exploring the cuisine more deeply reveals a very rich variety. To find this diversity, however, one must go out of the usual tourist areas that most confine themselves to.
England has a rich food culture and I believe only a few of those dishes actually made it here.
I think you hit the nail on the head with respect to quality of ingredients and quality of cooking in Malta. I also find that Maltese are more interested in how large their portions are instead of how exquisite it tastes. To top it all, Maltese cuisine is poor and virtually non-existent despite the various claims made here re stuffed olives (Italians call them bracciole) and others.
With the exclusion of a certain patissier, no one truly experiments with food and offers the form of novelty and variety one finds in the UK and in Europe.
I visited both London and Rome, in fact I was in London last week and believe me the food in London is much better than in Rome, which is usually overpriced.
Daphne never stated that London restaurants are jam-packed with Londoners, or even English or British diners for that matter. Less important again is the nationality of waiter unfortunate enough to have you as a client, with your tickling fetish.
But more importantly, how strange that you’d try to bring race into the argument. London’s dining scene is fabulous BECAUSE of the stunning international mix you find there.
The Maltese have no idea what Italian food is.
Soggy cannolli, pasta everything and plastic pizza.
The best Italian pizzerias are run by Egyptians, the best bufala mozarella produced by farms run by Sikh Indians and the best fresh produce managed by North African Arabs.
Call it specialist outsourcing. The slow food association, responsible for transforming McDonald’s into a glocal enterprise working to the same ethic with Illy, Barilla etc.
The idea extending to environmental and spatial issues to uphold the annual transumanza from the central Apennines down to the coast. It’s what gives the meat of Chianina cattle, which originate in the Indian subcontinent anyway, its hypnotic taste.
The rural work ethic and its relation to the land is the end game. Britain’s doing the same, as is France. It’s a defiant challenge to multinationals bent on colonising every acre. It also makes the perfect working holiday, tend to cows, sleep under the stars, and you’re treated to a sagra in every village along the way.
Food is politics per excellence. Such is Muscat’s bassezza, il-bniedem baxx, u l-hena tieghu ibaxxi, don’t think there’s a word to describe his actions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6GArVve9xE
Moo. Natural field cyclic processing and free fresh feed in all its required variations.
We’re stuck in the multinational paradigm. Serfs in spirit.
Or as Muscat would have it, tajbin fl-iskola.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frOl9mO7q6o
Studja Joseph. Forsi titghallem xi haga.
Afghan cuisine, Jozef. To think that some of us look down our noses at them.
That face…priceless !
Minestra is more than just vegetables boiled in water and if cooked properly is delicious and healthy eating.
[Daphne – Traditional Maltese minestra, yes, is literally vegetables boiled in water. Do you think people who lived in the sort of conditions which forced them to eat minestra and nothing but minestra bothered making stock? Do you think any ‘traditional Maltese housewife’ does? Or faffing around sweating the vegetables bit by bit and bringing them together? How many people do that even now? The most they might do before boiling the vegetables is fry a bit of onion and add a bit of kunserva to the ‘toqlija’. The reason minestra tends to be so revolting is because vegetables boiled to extinction always are, especially when the predominant smell and taste is cabbage (that stink of school kitchens as you walk through village streets, thankfully, is no more, though). Ironically, vegetables boiled to extinction are precisely the main criticism of what used to constitute ‘English food’. If you have to cite minestra in praise of Maltese food, that about sums up the standard, doesn’t it.]
And what about the patata l-forn bil-majjal, the qarabaghli or brungiel mimli, the fenek msajjar fl-inbid ahmar, the tigiega l-forn, the soppa ta’ l-armla, the kusksu bil-bajd mgholli, the timpana, ross il-forn, torti tal-haxu jew tal-lampuki, aljotta, hut mixwi and snacks such as zebbug mimli, tadam mqadded, qarnit, etc. You are wetting my appettite for Maltese food this morning.
[Daphne – Equally ridiculous is the insistence on using Maltese to name dishes that can be named perfectly well in the language you’re using: English. Thus: roast pork and potatoes, stuffed courgettes and aubergines, rabbit cooked in red wine, roast chicken (so this is a Maltese dish, is it?), baked rice, grilled fish, stuffed olives, sundried tomatoes, octopus. The only ones of those dishes you should be using Maltese for is soppa tal-armla, kusksu, torti tal-haxu, aljotta and a linguistic hybrid, lampuki pie. Nobody I know puts boiled eggs in kusksu and as for ‘torti tal-haxu’…I trust you do realise that these are all extremely basic meals, and hardly ‘cuisine’. While on the subject of rabbit, the way it is cooked in ‘rabbit restaurants’ is disgusting. I can’t believe people would go out, sit in hideous surroundings and pay money to eat something so badly made. But then refer to my other views about poor standards, above.]
There is nothing better than the Maltese food or Mediterranean food. Actually all our dishes are coming from different parts example is the backed tagine you find in Egypt its same as our imqarrun il-forn. As for the rabbit I have never found anyone who fries it in garlic like we do. When its stewed any where in Europe that is done.You put pouched eggs in the kusksu and goat cheese also. I’m Maltese, Proud of it. British food is also good but I wouldn’t praise any other countries food compared to the Maltese.
There is so much wrong with this. But why is it thought to be oh so noble and patriotic to, not only defend Maltese cuisine, tradition etc, but to actually put it upon the highest possible yet completely undeserved pedestal?
I take ‘there’s nothing better than (the) Maltese food…’ as my example but the same can be applied to almost anything.
For Pete’s sake, even in the Dalli vs Barroso case just a few weeks back, so many comments on timesofmalta.com were berating Dalli’s critics for taking the side of ‘a foreigner’ against ‘a Maltese’, heaven forfend! This irrespective of who the foreigner or the Maltese were, or the entire context of the saga.
Anyway, back to Tony Bonello’s rabbit: So Tony, you never found anyone who fries… etc, etc.
So, what? Did you actually wander the streets of, I don’t know, Paris, asking restauranteurs if they could cook you a ‘fenek moqli bit-tewm?’
Because that’s clearly and indisputably the best possible way that rabbit can be cooked and eaten? Served in a big ‘bowel’ in the middle of the table, alongside another ‘bowel’ of oily chips and a hobza tal-Malti?
[Daphne – That is SUCH disgusting food in such a HORRID environment. When people think a dump with terrible food like that is the best place to take visitors to Malta for ‘an authentic Maltese experience’, they are so wrong. The visitors are usually horrified, uncomfortable and on edge but are too polite to do anything other than praise the food falsely and hope they will be out of there as soon as possible. They also feel insulted and bewildered, because this is the equivalent of your supposedly smart British hosts taking you to a working-class caff for a plate of egg and chips or some greasy sausages and lumpy mash for ‘an authentic British experience’ instead of to some lovely restaurant. I am fascinated by the way Maltese people don’t get that this is precisely how they should NOT treat their guests, and that if they would not expect to be taken to some working-class dump full of savages using their cutlery like garden tools to eat cheap and badly made food, when they are in Italy or Britain on work trips, they should accord their own guests the same respect. Supper at a rabbit restaurant is not an authentic Maltese treat. It is an insult to your guests and a negative representation of what Malta has to offer in the way of food, what Maltese table manners are like, and what Maltese food preferences and standards are.]
Dear Daphne,I think you are making a lot of sweeping statements.
At one point you quote the Maltese who put corned beef and kunserva in all their recipes while you don’t quote what the British really eat at home. I think that both in Malta and in Britain there are people who eat convenience food and others who eat well prepared nourishing food.
[Daphne – What the British really eat at home, John, depends on their age, education, income, background, where they live and their general interest in food, just as it does with people living anywhere else in Europe including Malta.]
In the many places I’ve been around the world apart from their local restaurants I have never seen a “British Restaurant”, though I’ve seen Italian, Chinese, Indian, Mongolian, Mexican and Australian mainly.
Whenever I stayed out of London in different places around Britain the food was below standard, and yes they invariably include french fries with anything even with macaroni, like we include onions in every recipe.
I like eating french fries when I’m dining out because we don’t prepare them at home, I’m deprived of such pleasures at home. But they put me off when presented together with macaroni or pizza.
[Daphne – Well, excuse me, but if you go to the sort of place that serves macaroni with chips, exactly what do you expect? God help Malta if the standard of all restaurants were to be judged by those horrid rabbit places.]
We have good original and not so original Maltese dishes: rabbit stew, stuffed courgettes, stuffed aubergines, beef stew, toqlija tal-qargha baghli, soppa tal-armla, ful bil-kosksu, ravjul mimli bl-irkotta, tigiega l-forn mimlija bil-haxu (raisins are included in the stuffing) bebbux bl-aljoli (I paid €7 in Finland for three snails fried in butter), torta tal-laham, fwied moqli biz-zalza tat-tuffieh, torta tal-lampuki, torta tal-irkotta, patata l-forn, bragjoli, laham fuq il-fwar, bakkaljaw, torta tal-ispinaci, caponata sauce, balbuljata. We eat a variety of fish, vendors in Zurrieq keep us supplied with fresh and frozen fish. There’s kirxa which I don’t like, mazzit, horse meat; in Emilia Romania they eat donkey meat, sommaro.
I think the quality of food nowadays depends a lot on the people who frequent restaurants, if they accept crap they will be presented with more crap.
With respect I disagree with your reasoning. Maltese culinary culture is influenced by foreign culture as much as the Maltese language is influenced by other foreign languages.
The same applies to anything we call Maltese. The fact that we have adopted foreign influence in our traditional cuisine doesn’t mean that this is not Maltese food. Otherwise if you apply the same reasoning to our language you will soon be saying that Maltese is not a language.
[Daphne – In fact, it isn’t really. It’s a sub-form of Arabic that was hived off from contact with the Arabic-speaking world and has found it nearly impossible to function adequately ever since, because the people left stranded to further its development in isolation were largely pig-ignorant savages and illiterate. By the time literacy arrived, it was already too late. Not that any kind of extensive vocabulary or complicated syntax was required: contemporary accounts tell us how the most privileged in Maltese society spent their time during the Age of Enlightenment, when their equals in the great European cities were discussing the big issues of the day that led to seminal and permanent change on this continent: they woke up late, ate a huge breakfast, strolled through Valletta, returned home to eat a huge lunch, slept, woke up in the evening and gambled at cards – with a pause for a huge supper – until the early hours of the morning, then went to bed and woke up at noon to repeat the process.]
Stopped reading when I came across your London comment. Style over substance in an over-dressed and over-pretentious setting. But then again London holds a certain allure amongst the shallow so I am not entirely surprised.
[Daphne – That is an incredibly stupid and chippy remark. Let’s try to keep this discussion rational, shall we? The best London restaurants are not style over substance but style WITH substance. Please mention some of the London restaurants at which you’ve eaten, only to find that they are ‘style over substance’. As for over-pretentious, please give some examples. The main reason I like British style is because it defines understated good taste. When people accuse those places of ‘over-pretentiousness’, I generally find that it’s because they feel awkward in that kind of environment, which brings out all their chippy resentment. They read relaxed elegance as ‘not my kind of place because it’s full of posh people who will be hostile to me’.]
Undeniably, and I agree, English / Scottish cuisine has some of the best raw materials out there -but there simply isn’t a overly-refined culinary culture to match it.
[Daphne – That’s because the better the raw ingredients are, the less you need to do to them, Jack. When your basic raw ingredients are maize, wheat and rice, as they were in Italy, you have be really creative.]
Without delving into the wine culture (that would be overkill) – Italian cuisine simply seeks to improve an already excellent base – with exquisites such as truffles, extra virgin oil, 30 year old aged vinegars etc.
[Daphne – Well, that shows how little you know about the subject, I’m afraid. Your average Italian ate nothing but maize, which is why there was a massive problem with the disease called pellagra, especially in the south of the country. If you think Italians ever ran around eating Parma ham and truffles, you are sadly mistaken. Truffles are one of the most expensive foods on earth, and they are in season only for a short while anyway. The base of Italian cuisine is not excellence but poverty – the cuisine grew out of the need to improve on rice, maize and wheat. Beef was for the rich. The poor had no meat at all, and those who kept animals would slaughter just the one pig a year for themselves.]
Can you find these ingredients in London? Of course you can – but why pay for an imitation in an infinitely inferior setting when you can simply get the real thing in its natural environment?
[Daphne – Your lack of knowledge is catastrophic, really. Why would aceto balsamic, olive oil or truffles bought in London be ‘imitation’? Exactly what is an imitation truffle? They are exactly what you would buy in Italy. And aceto balsamico is no more in its ‘natural environment’ in Puglia than it is in Britain.]
I would do that just to enjoy the theatre not the dining experience per se, and bump into the occasional celebrity – like Mick Jagger at Hakkasan, Mayfair – a few months back (incidentally accompanied by L’Wren Scott). Was the food great? Good but not great. Was the experience and service good? Sublime. in your heart of hearts – you know you’ve had better, and lighting and service cannot compensate your slightly disappointed taste-buds.
[Daphne – Hakkasan? How stale. The world has moved on. I last went there in 1999. Try this instead: http://boccadilupo.com/review.php You won’t see any celebrities there, but there you go – when Maltese people think ‘good London restaurants’ they think ‘celebrities and Mayfair’. That’s not where the good restaurants are.]
Some of the best eats I’ve ever had were from obscure, small, family-run restaurants tucked away in some small alley with some 90 year old grandma doing her business.
[Daphne – That’s exactly the sort of thing I can’t stand. Why bother eating out at all, if you’re looking for a kitchen experience and the feeling that your nanna has cooked for you? If I want a kitchen experience and some ‘good old home cooking’ I’ll stay in my own kitchen and do it myself. When I go out, I want something I am incapable of producing myself and an environment far more compelling than my kitchen or dining-room, not less so.]
Yes the furniture was looking tired and the service was slow – but the dining experience would leave its so called London ‘equivalent’ for dead. You simply cannot transplant raw ingredients outside its setting, or the experienced chef and expect it to surpass the original – no matter how polish the new setting is.
[Daphne – Well, I’m afraid you can. Do you seriously think that the numerous buffalo farms around Naples, and the mozzarella producers they supply, are making mozzarella di bufala only for the Campania region? Or for the rest of Italy, for that matter? It’s flown fresh every day to restaurants all over Europe, but mainly to….that’s right, London. This is a brave, new world, Jack. Embrace it. And ditch the kitchen suppers cooked by some stranger’s nonna down some godforsaken alley just because your chips relax there, and raise your game. London is the most tolerant and democratic place on earth: a man can walk into what you probably think of as a ‘posh restaurant’ wearing a pair of red hotpants and a bra top and nobody will even blink or look.]
And as for London’s two-hour dining policy and last drinks policy in the evening. Guess we are worlds apart.
[Daphne – Yes, we are. But then one of the reasons is probably because I cook, and this means that home-cooking is exactly what I don’t look for when I go out. The people who enjoy sitting in alleys eating what someone’s nanna has produced in her pokey kitchen and served up on some horrid plates probably don’t cook anything much themselves if they think this is great. This is not an observation about you, but just in general. Most Maltese people can’t cook properly to save their lives, which is why they think everything they eat in restaurants is great.]
To each his own. Exactly what makes you an authority on the subject? The fact that you are editor to some obscure monthly culinary magazine? Or is it quarterly? So bland I can’t recall.
[Daphne – Take some well-meant, genuine advice from me, Jack, because I have spent 50 years on this planet and seen quite a bit of people and their quirks: chips are a very heavy burden to drag through life and you are best off jettisoning them. You will travel lighter and travel further, and people will respond more warmly to you in a way they will not if they detect your feelings of resentment towards them which they correctly deduce come from your own feelings of inferiority. Do not regard every challenge to your views as a criticism of you personally or process it as damage to your ego and sense of self. Interesting conversations are all about exchanges of views and there are invariably going to be differences and challenges to your opinions.
Lots of teenagers are chippy, and even some people in their early 20s, but when a man is still chippy and resentful in full-blown adulthood, that is a problem for him and those around him. The world is not full of your betters who got there through unfairness or because life’s a bitch and who are out to get you, criticise you or laugh at you. The world is what it is, and it is full of people who are ready to embrace anybody at all who is interesting and personable, even if he or she comes from a slum.
By the way – Hakkasan Mayfair was opened in 2010 – http://hakkasan.com/locations/hakkasan-mayfair/ (so much for 1999).
[Daphne – Not really, no. The one in Hanway Place opened in 2001. Forgive me if I was two years off. At my great age I tend to get a little confused sometimes.]
I will be magnanimous and limit the list of fallacies in your argument to just that (the rest are too many to point out) so that you can relish in your ‘Sex and the City’ fantasy of jet lunches.
Get out of the kitchen woman and stick to politics.
[Daphne – I would advise any woman not to date you until you have dealt with your personality issues. A man who reacts like this when he perceives a difference of opinion as damage to his ego is not just unpleasant to live with but may eventually become dangerous in one way or another. Sex and the City ‘jet lunches’ (what are jet lunches, anyway?) are exactly my idea of hell, so really, you haven’t a clue at all. Though it may upset your preconceptions, it is perfectly possible for a woman to be informed about both food and politics. The trouble here, I think, is that you are trapped in the usual dichotomy of perceiving politics as male and food as female, and that Daphne, who is clearly male as otherwise she wouldn’t be able to discuss politics in the way she does, has no place in the kitchen. You’ll be pleased to know that I shall shortly be starting a food blog, so you will have plenty of opportunity to get upset. You can always take it out on your girlfriend, if you have one. Men can be so bitchy and tiresome, worse than women at times.]
Daphne please – arguments are not won by seniority.
[Daphne – Seniority does not mean ‘older’, Jack, and that was not an argument. It was advice. I have met a lot of people with chips in at least four generations, and their thought and behaviour patterns, and their reactions, are so predictably similar that they could have been factory-made. There’s even a chippy person’s facial expression, greeting and handshake that I can now pick up immediately through experience and observation. Chippy people have a really hard time in life, and the only way they can get ahead is by joining the Labour Party because the rest of society – in and out of politics – instinctively blocks people with chips as they are correctly perceived to be reluctant participants who might cause sabotage from within of anything they envy or fear as superior and hostile. Arguments are won by the rational and the informed.]
And sometimes, you should just admit, graciously, that you could (in terms of objective opinion) be wrong or are plain wrong – Hakkasan Mayfair was opened in 2010 – unless you are implying that they posted erroneous material on their own site! Just drop it and stop digging.
[Daphne – I have no way of putting this without sounding slightly rude and perhaps a little bit patronising, but there is no way of doing otherwise so I’ll just plough in: I have very great difficulty remembering where I was and when, and the reason isn’t early dementia. The reason is that these are not searing-memory milestones for me. The fact that I remember a visit to Hakkasan so very long ago is already remarkable. I only brought it up because you did. It might be very difficult for you to acknowledge that this is something I actually do know about, but try. This is not a competition. This is a discussion involving adults. I would never challenge a sports writer about his knowledge of football.]
I enjoy this blog and your no-nonsense / terrier approach to journalism. However sometimes you just get bogged down by these gratuitous dispensations of wisdom or ‘taste’ – smack of a morbid blend between quasi-aristocratic pretentions and tabloid agony aunt.
[Daphne – There you go again. Never mind. I have had to contend with boys then men like you since the age of 16 – they decide I am somehow their social or intellectual superior or both of those things and therefore obviously very arrogant and insufferable, and somebody who will reject them, laugh at them or criticise them, and then proceed to play this pseudo-courtship game of trying to get my attention and engagement by being rude, offensive and challenging. Back then I just confirmed their prejudices by telling them where to get off; now I have a little more patience even though nothing in life has made me revise my view that men with chips are best avoided.]
Wonderful.
Generally speaking the Maltese have so much to learn.
A gardening blog would be very welcome indeed though I guess that may be to much to handle.
[Daphne – Actually I think I might make it all those sorts of related things: food, gardening, interiors, furniture, textiles and so on.]
And sartorialism.
Jack, possibly the rudest bigot to have ever darkened this notebook’s pages, and there wasn’t even a trace of vulgarity, in the….vulgar sense, to be found among his bombastic drivel.
That is quite an achievement. Well done, sir!
Oh good! I would love to follow a ‘Taste and Flair’ blog. You could also write about social issues; we’ve had discussions on this blog about schools, gays, abortion etc.
But how can you possibly cope with another blog? Don’t you think you should find some time to erm.. sleep? Good luck and well done.
I am pretty certain that the main problem with our local chefs and the abysmal food that they create all point to the course that they take at the ITS. Good grade students go to sixth form and eventually to university. Students with low or very low grades usually opt to take a course at the ITS.
Couldn’t agree with you more on the subject of restaurants in Italy. All my friends are forever raving about how you can just walk into any restaurant in Italy and you’ll have a fantastic meal.
Whenever I did that, I got a very unimpressive product. I learned that you still have to do some research on forums or try to get advice from someone if you really want a good meal, just like any other country.
Also you’ll find that those denigrating food in the UK are usually the ones who walk into any old place, order pasta or pizza and expect it to be good.
The Maltese became obese as soon as they stated to eat English food.
[Daphne – No, Persil, the Maltese started to become fat and obese as soon as they had the money to buy food, but not enough money to buy good food and not enough knowledge to know what good food is because some of those good foods don’t cost much. And the real culprit is the dietary dependence on bread and pasta. In the past, poor Maltese ate a whole loaf a day, but it was their only food and they walked everywhere and did hard physical labour. They have carried on with the whole-loaf habit but also eat other food over and above that and drive everywhere. The result is an explosion in size. It has absolutely nothing to do with ‘British food’, which is another stupid myth. The British were in Malta from 1800 to 1979 and the explosion in weight began way after that, a negative by-product of PN-generated affluence. Even fat people stuck out a mile when I was growing up, let alone obese ones. And do you really, honestly think that the vast mass of the Maltese population, made up of rural peasants and the urban poor, was obese in the 19th century, the height of the ‘British period’? All they had was their one loaf a day and their few bits of vegetables.]
The Mediterranean type of food is the best for health as it is rich in fish and vegetables and of course fruit.
[Daphne – Another myth, though this time it is not a peculiarly Maltese myth but one bought in from those Northern Europeans and North Americans whose sole Mediterranean focus is southern Italy, Spain and Greece. In reality there is no such thing as ‘the Mediterranean diet’. The Mediterranean basin is a vast place surrounded by many countries with widely diversified cuisine and ingredients. All of these countries are on the Mediterranean, and they can in no way be said to share anything at all in terms of diet, cooking style, or choice and availability of ingredients:
Morocco
Algeria
Libya
Egypt
Israel
Jordan
Lebanon
Syria
Cyprus
Turkey
Bulgaria
Greece
Albania
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Croatia
Slovenia
Italy
Malta
Monaco
France
Spain
Our home grown vegetables and fruit are the best. Compare for example our strawberries, peaches or grapes. We should be proud of our produce and food culture. In
due time we will lose our identity. Foreigners laugh at us when we tell them that many Maltese cannot speak in their native tongue. Being a small country works against us.
[Daphne – The native tongue of some (by no means many) Maltese is English. This appears to be very difficult for some people to understand. It is most certainly one of my native tongues, the other being Maltese. I would not have been this fluent had it not been my native tongue. That much should be obvious.]
May I say, with respect, f*ck your pride.
Pride is what has kept us back.
You cannot be serious. Maltese strawberries have disappeared: the seeds cannot be found because obviously farmers want part of the gravity train so they imported new seedlings. A large number of the original yellow and white peaches have disappeared: try and find one peach with a maggot, it normally says a lot about the produce. Grapes? a large number of the Maltese white grapes were picked in August/September and loaded with seeds, sweet and wonderful. Try and find that in the local market. A large number of the farmers dropped their fields and started importing fruit.
Whoops! gravity train? Where did that one come from.
Galaxy Express.
The best pizza I eat is in Malta.
Is that true? So where else did you eat it, other than Malta?
Than you know jackshit about pizza. And your stomach must be bloated for most of the time without your knowing.
No one should criticise Maltese food before trying the Bhima burger from Hamrun. Good cuisine is all about portions, and nothing else.
Sarcasm. Got to be sarcasm.
PLEASE tell me it’s sarcasm?
Daphne, once again I agree with you. The most delicious food i’ve ever tasted was in London, on the other hand the worst was when I was in Rome and Florence. Maybe I went to the worst restaurants, I don’t know.
I am sorry Daphne but I cannot agree with you on this. England have not even a cuisine apart from the roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, fish and chips and the English bfast which is the unhealthy one.Here we are talking about traditional cooking and not restaurants.I live in Austria now but by far Malta have a better cuisine than England.You will never find an English Restaurant nowhere in the world just because they dont have a real national traditional food.I am in the catering business for the last 23 years.
[Daphne – English food is just like the language, Roderick. This is what you simply don’t understand. Both are the result of a long-standing openness to assimilation from other cultures. That is also the reason you will find restaurants serving the cuisine of hundreds of countries and ethnic groups in the British capital, and food shops and food markets selling ingredients and specialities from all over the world, but you really have to bust a gut trying to find anything other than Italian food in the Italian capital, and then it’s rubbish. They take pride in serving only their own food and eating only their own food – the very attitude which has made Italy such a creative backwater compared to other parts of Europe now. And this is not a reflection on you as I don’t know you at all, but my own experience is that people in ‘the catering business’, and who describe it that way, rarely have a genuine feeling for or interest in food itself.]
Do you ever feel like just giving up, Daphne?
[Daphne – All the time, but I am enormously resilient.]
You obviously don’t know what you are talking about. Look up “The Two Fat Ladies” on the internet to find out how varied English food can be.
And that’s just traditional British food.
Britain today is a mouthwatering melting-pot of culinary cultures – with chicken korma being the nation’s favourite dish. If the inability to find a country’s cuisine abroad is a sign of how bad it is, when was the last time you found a Maltese restaurant anywhere outside Malta? We have our beloved deli Paparellu in London but that’s about it.
Another day tripper! Must think that England is greater Manchester!
I don’t know anything about English or Scottish cuisine as I rarely visit the UK. However Italian food is divine. The Italians know how to use very simple recipes using only the freshest ingredients. It’s very rare indeed that you end up disappointed after a meal, anywhere in Italy.
[Daphne – On the contrary: I am most often disappointed after a meal in Italy unless it is at very specific restaurants. I am able to predict what the food will be like from a whole raft of clues in the general aesthetics of the place, the decor, style of menu, clientele, name, appearance of waiters etc. Generally, I drive my companions crazy refusing to go into one restaurant after another, but almost always turn out to be right. I am tired of hearing Maltese people say that you can eat well anywhere in Italy. You really can’t. That myth took hold when there was nothing in Malta either by way of restaurants or in the shops, and Italy/Sicily were the closest places we could travel to. The comparison was immediate and impressed us strongly. Yes, we thought we could eat well anywhere in Italy, even at the simplest trattoria, and compared to Malta we could. But the situation was relative.]
‘I don’t know anything about……..However…..’
Shall I go on?
Daphne,
Agree 100%. I’ve been saying that the best food, food shops and restaurants are in London for 25 years now. The only reason why ignorant Maltese deride English food is because English tourists are too diplomatic to say that the food they have been served is rubbish.
And of course as long as the sun shines, the lager is cheap and the waiter has a sister in ‘Stretford’, they’ll smile at anything and won’t complain.
Best curries in the world in Bradford, most delicious of all fish at a good chippie, and NOT the over-priced stuff we get here. That’s just for starters. Best Greek, best Thai, best everything in London.
England may have been a food backwater in the 1970s but it is now one of the most exciting countries to be in from a culinary point of view.
From molecular cooking to traditional fish and chips, British kitchens cover the whole gamut and beyond. Even regional cities like Leeds, where I live, have incredible restaurants.
And the curries in nearby Bradford are unparalled, thanks to cooks of Pakistani and Indian origin. The British are also rediscovering their food heritage. Pop into any butcher in Yorkshire and buy a slice of stand pie – ‘pork pie’ to outsiders. It’s mouthwateringly moreish but if you’ve only ever tasted shrink-wrapped pork pies you wouldn’t know how sublime this kind of food can be.
[Daphne – You tell ’em, Saviour.]
Oh please, not molecular cooking.
Major health risks there.
My mate Spud does a killer barbecued chicken with petrol sauce – pink and frozen on the inside, black and carbonised on the outside. We always wake up with the Rangoon runs, but it’s a fantastic detoxifier: you lose about twelve pounds in weight, and the sand cleans you out from the inside as it works its way through the system, and the petrol does the rest. Tapeworm problem solved.
Amazing (or sad) that the intense debate/interest is generated by a discussion on food. No such passion/outrage re: shambolic state of Maltese politics.
[Daphne – That’s because this is not essentially a debate about food, if you look closely. It has been turned into a debate about national pride and national identity. The same thing happened when I wrote that ‘irkotta’ is just the way Maltese hamalli mispronounced rikotta and fed their error down the generations and into the wider culture. Regardless of whether the actual product is the same as the Sicilian one or not (it isn’t), the word is the very same one, mispronounced just as the cheese itself was mis-made, though in that case with happy results.]
Yeah, what Daphne said. Also, a cursory glance at the online Times, Independent, and obviously Daphne’s myriad other contributions would immediately dispel your claim, sir!
It’s also because the arrogance and ignorance are infuriating. And what’s really astounding is the complete lack of reason and intelligence.
How could people assume they know the culinary tapestry of a country as diverse as Britain? It’s a country with so many different faces – the seaside, the mountains, the agriculture, the cities, the mixing pot of different cultures.
And the resources that come from this are staggering.
A person can be forgiven for saying they do not know about British food, and haven’t tasted anything but fish and chips, but you have to be plain stupid (and arrogant and up yourself) to assume there’s nothing else.
Not sure if this is still topical, since the blog has moved on but here goes.
There was a comment about potatoes and how every country has potato dishes. Well, when I went to Italy in 1970 I lived in a town called Piacenza, close to Parma. Back then very few people consumed potatoes on a regular basis – apart from potato flour gnocchi and cakes – and the main sources of carbohydrates were rice, home-made stuffed pasta and polenta.
Even in my university course, the potato was treated very much as a minor crop, much to my disappointment, since I knew how important it was here in Malta.
By the time I left Italy for good in 1981, the situation had changed completely. The potato had become a major cash crop and chips were everywhere, even as pizza toppings.
It could be partly due to the McDonalds culture since chips were invariably called fries. In Sicily the potato has also become important for export to Holland and Germany.
[Daphne – Well, the staple crops in northern Italy were rice and maize, so that shaped the diet. And dependency on maize became so intense right across Italy that there was a major problem with pellagra, especially in the south where they ate little else: http://www.isita-org.com/jass/Contents/2007%20vol85/Articoli/JassPDFAggiunte/Mariani2007.pdf ]
My last trip to Italy (May) left me disappointed with two (out of 5) bad dinners in restaurants, and one of them grossly so. Could have been Bugibba, only the waiter wasn’t Bulgarian.
On the other hand we love the salumerie and latterie…so mornings we pack a bag with cheeses, hams and some good bread – gelati for afters. Maximum 15 euro for 2 …that’s lunch in Italy for us.
Daphne, my family was poor in terms of money, as Dad used to work as a farmer and the income was no good, but hey , the rabbits, chickens we used to grow tasted a lot different to what you can find today, even the eggs we used to have our own and the yolk used to be golden yellow not like today. Mum used to make her own kunserva, and tomatoe sauce was made by fresh tomatoes, when they were available. I think bad food is more to do with everyone being lazy, and opting for the easy way by using frozen ingredients
Very interesting 129 comments so far.
Further proof, if any were needed, that we Maltese ‘think’ we are the best.
We are and we deserve the best.
Like the government we landslided into power.
The best government in the world.
Exactly like our cuisine.
The best.
What do you expect from a small town perched on a reef off the North African coast?
Dear Daphne
Once upon a time we had a Westminister style civil service headed by gentlemen (and a few intelligent hardworking women)………
Today we no longer have a Westminister style civil service and indeed a friend of mine who lectures at university told me he had to revisit his lecture slides in view of the changing role of the civil service here in Malta which has become notably absent
The thing that should strike anyone who has ever been to London is the huge variety of restaurants and prices. But this is not only in London – I have eaten pub food in remote northern villages that was better than the food in many Maltese restaurants.
There is no variety in Malta. The food in most Maltese restaurants is boring and the prices are similar in each eatery.
Anyone who says English, or for that matter, British food, is boring is stuck in some Enid Blyton book where the children eat tongue and tinned peaches. The puzzling thing is that if Muscat’s speech writer is British why is he writing these things?
Re what Britain has given us: the greatest gift of all, a culture of democracy. Wherever Britain had a colony the people are now better off than their neighbours. I am thinking of India or Hong Kong for example.
[Daphne – Britain did not give us a culture of democracy. It gave us a parliamentary system and parliamentary elections, which is something else.]
Look at a map of the world and wherever the British had a colony is nowadays a democracy. There are just a few exceptions in Africa. There are some people who claim that people not used to democracy will never have it in their country. Look at Libya, which wasn’t part of the British Empire, for example. We thought we could just force democracy on them after they got rid of Gaddafi but they don’t seem to want it.
[Daphne – There are many places which claim to be democracies but which are not, even in the British Commonwealth. The reason why the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting is going to be held in Malta is that Sri Lanka is one of them. Elections and parliaments do not make democracy. That is only part of it.]
If this topic is ever in danger of slowing down, we could always mention Varist Bartolo’s favourite: laham taz-ziemel.
I have just returned to Italy after 3 weeks in Malta. The Maltese diet is appalling. Try spending a day at Armier Bay and watch what the bathers manage to plough through in one day. My husband and I were flabbergasted. As I watched I wished I possessed your writing skills to describe it.
I am not sure I agree with you on Maltese cuisine being bad in itself. I still enjoy baked rice, torta tal-lampuki and soppa tal-armla. What’s all wrong is the Maltese diet where they mix different ingredients from a variety of food groups in the same meal. Example: pasta carbonara (Maltese style with bacon and cream) followed by a cheese burger with chips and then banoffee cake. Sickening to watch.
It”s true that a lot of pasta is eaten here in Italy. However, sauces are normally very light and very rarely contain cream. After a plate of pasta, in fourteen years that I have lived here, I have never seen anybody eat a burger as a main and much less a heavy dessert.
Afternoon snacks in Malta (fejn il-bahar) consist of bread-rolls stuffed with gbejniet, chicken and mayonnaise, washed down with Green Label wine.
As for your minestra comment, in Italy I make great minestra. One of the tricks is to cube all veggies (no cabbage), add them according to their cooking time (or in a slow cooker) add fresh borlotti beans, and before serving – a drizzle of olive oil and grated Parmesan. Trust me, it’s anything but tasteless.
In London I normally eat at restaurants which offer cuisine from those parts of the world that I haven’t yet visited. The last time, it was Ethiopian at Keret and Vietnamese (forgot name) both incredibly good.
Lastly, Joseph Muscat should never have passed such a cliched and offensive remark. Veru injorant.
Pasta night.
I rest my case. No wait, there’s the Lejla Maltija.
There are “majjalati” which are organised in several illegal restaurants/“farmhouses” dotting our countryside, football grounds and bocci clubs around the islands.
For €25 you get galletti bil-gbejniet, bigilla dips, hobz biz-zejt, then an abundant portion of spaghetti “bolognese”, and by the time you are nearly full, you are served with “the real deal” .
You end up looking at the mysterious cut of cooked piglet and fidgeting with the oven-ready chips. Drinks are free where there is an abundance of unlabelled “home made” wine, and peanuts.
Fenkata nights with friends are basically the same – the owners of the eating-houses always have an uncontrolled free hand on the amount and prices on the drinks ordered. They are just given a blank cheque. In more civilised countries, the people who serve drinks mark the amounts on the coasters, but this is Malta where even prime ministers cheat.
And Porky’s in Hamrun serves il-Bhima
http://porkyshamrun.com/porkywp/menu-category/food/
[Daphne – Pretty much sums up the average Maltese attitude to anything, John: ejjew ha niffangaw ghal hamsa u ghoxrin ewro biss.]
Re: Service charges and tips. In Australia there is generally no service charge and most Australians do not tip most of the time. Is this a good thing? Not sure – but that is the reality. Some ( very few) restaurants include a surcharge on weekends and public holidays to take account of higher wages. In most restaurants tips are not expected.