Fejn thobb il-qalb jimxu r-riglejn.
Where the heart lives, there the legs walk. –Maltese expression
Caffe Cordina, Valletta, Malta, 2004
I am twenty years old and have just eaten what I think is the most perfect pastry in the world. But I think I’m in love with the pastry because I’m young and I’m sitting at a cafe in Malta, and maybe it has nothing to do at all with what is on my plate. Perhaps it is also because I’m enamoured with the word pastizzi, the way it rolls off the tongue, the ahh long and drawn out, the izzi strong on the front and soft on the back, a “t” tucked away in the middle, eet-zee. To be fair, it is also delicious, all flaky and buttery, diamond-shaped and filled with ricotta cheese and pepper, crunchy creases in the dough, and I’ve never in my life eaten something so stuffed with promise, and fortune, and youth. So maybe, I think to myself, flipping through the orientation guide to the summer job I’ve taken here, my adventure in Malta just about to start, it is the most perfect pastry in the world.
Matt & the Pastizzeria, Malta, 2004
That summer, I have one other American friend named Matt. He falls in love with pastizzi, too. In fact, he’s so in love with it—just the ricotta ones, not the pea ones because peas, he says, are weird—that he walks to the local pastizzeria every morning before we take the students to school and buys a few to stash in his backpack in case the tuna fish at school isn’t appetizing (it usually isn’t). By the end of the summer, we all joke that he will probably return home to Colorado part-pastizzi, with it forever in his hair, his skin, his veins. I never considered the fact that although our language school served us the same tuna with mayonnaise on a stale bread roll every day, I didn’t return home romanticizing that my body was made of fish. These are the kinds of things we are thinking about back then, back when we were twenty. One night we talk about what pasta shape we would be, and I remember Matt was spaghetti, Katka bowtie, Anna angel hair, and me, I pick cavatappi, the twirly pasta, the one that keeps the sauce in its curves, always holding onto something. What is interesting about future Matt is that, even though spaghetti is common and dependable, the kind of pasta you’d expect to come back again and again, he never does. It’s the rest of the pasta that clings, somehow.
Exiles Bar, Malta, 2004
We’ve just stopped at a corner shop to buy pastizzis and Cisk beer. We’re college students, after all, and we can’t really afford anything else on this island except for cheese and pea pastries and cheap beer. We walk down the passeggiata that snakes around the sea to our favourite bar in Sliema—Exiles, a thatched-roof bar, a crusty, eccentric kind of place, practically dangling off the rocky cliffs—and we sit outside the bar on the rocks looking out onto the bay, talking about the summer and our dreams. The song Good Day, Sunshine by the Beatles plays from the jukebox, the pastizzis are crunchy and buttery, the bartender pulls his hair into a bun, and it suddenly occurs to me that I might never have another pastizzi for the rest of my life. My friend Marcin must be thinking the same thing, except about the beer. “This can’t be the end to our Malta story,” he says, suddenly, to all of us, with the seriousness of twenty-year-olds realizing something important. “Ok, let’s make a promise,” my friend Magda says, “we come back here every five years.” “No matter what,” we say. I look out onto the craggy limestone horizon, hundreds of beige buildings with colourful balconies fitting together in tight rows like misshapen puzzle pieces rising up from the electric blue Mediterranean Sea, and I wonder how anyone could have ever built a place like this. Desolate and naked as it is, with tiny green shrubs dotting the cracks in the sidewalks, tiny reminders of trees, I already longed for it again. My body blended in here, in this limestone world. Yes, we all say. No matter what.
Xlendi Bay, Gozo, Malta, 2009
It’s been five years. Five years since I’ve tasted pastizzi, five years since I’ve tripped over these cobblestone streets, five years since I’ve heard the impossible sounds of Maltese, all happy inflections and petulant throatiness. I’ve moved to Arizona, met the boy who would be my future husband, adopted a cat, done a master’s degree in creative writing, applied for a writing grant to go back to Malta, and survived the death of my best friend. I used to send her postcards from Malta, exclamation points everywhere. After she died, her mom returned my postcards to me, bundled in a big rubber band, all those colourful boats and glorious pastries and crystal blue waters. I’m returning to Malta broken, along with most of the English language group leaders, who have already lost parents to cancer, gone through divorces, lost their dream jobs, taken jobs they didn’t love, had abortions, been diagnosed with lifelong illnesses, had miscarriages. I’m also returning to Malta with hope, because at twenty-five, hope is still something palpable and easy to find in magnificent places. I am, at first, so nervous to return—had I changed too much? had they? had Malta?—but it turns out we are all wondering the same thing, and we cook meals, we go dancing, we go to fishing villages, we swim, and we’ve all changed but we also haven’t. On the last day, I take a ferry by myself to Malta’s tinier island, Gozo, and leave the bundle of postcards under a rock in Xlendi Bay, a kind of return. On my way back, I buy some pastizzis because they remind me of happy days.
Paparazzi’s Bar, St. Julian’s, Malta, 2009
“Did you see our new euro?” my Maltese friend Alba says one night as we drink Malibu and pineapple—the only thing we drank back in 2004—at Paparazzi’s, a trendy bar flanked by a pastizzeria on one side and a hand-blown glass shop on the other. “We voted for what we wanted on the front,” she says, describing the messy process that required every Maltese person to vote on their favourite coins. “At first, we had twelve options. Then we voted for four, then we voted for two, then we voted for the winner.” She passes me the small copper-coloured coin. “But look at the front,” she says, grinning. It’s a little etching of Western Europe. “Do you see what’s missing?” she asks me. Malta is so small it’s not on most maps, I suddenly remember. Malta is not on this map either. “We’re not even on our own currency!” she says. I’m elated by this. Back when it was the lira, the images chosen to represent Malta were a weasel, an olive tree, a Maltese crab, a Lampuki fish, a rose, a shrub that only grows in the Mediterranean, and a bird. Malta is like a country wiped off its own map, made up of all the foods I’ve never tried, next to all the people I’ve never met, all the places I didn’t go that summer, all the lives I could have led.
Upper Barrakka Gardens, Valletta, Malta, 2014
Ryan and I have just gotten married. We got married in a garden overlooking the Sunset Cliffs in San Diego, where he’s from. A year later, I’m pulling him through the streets of Valletta to the Upper Barrakka Gardens, where the same friends who flew in for our wedding are waiting to surprise him at sunset with bottles of champagne. It is Ryan’s 30th birthday and, for the rest of us, our ten-year Malta reunion. I have been waiting ten years to show this place to this person I love, a place that, when we first met, I talked to him about because I thought it made me sound exotic and interesting. On that first date, at a coffee shop near the university where we had blueberry scones instead of pastizzi, I knew that Ryan was going to be a very important person in my life, because as soon as I said the word Malta, he nodded knowingly. As it turned out, Ryan’s favourite artist escaped to Malta from Italy in the 1600s after accidentally killing a man in a brawl, and now there is a whole museum devoted to his works. “Ryan,” I said, “I know Caravaggio. I’ve been to his museum.” His eyes widened. “You’ve seen…The Beheading of St. John the Baptist? In person?” His disbelief told me everything I needed to know, and I told him I would take him there one day.
Rikkardu’s Restaurant, Gozo, Malta, 2014
I am in Malta for our ten-year reunion partly because of my travel writing. After we settle on the date, I contact the Maltese tourism bureau and ask them if they will sponsor my trip in exchange for some articles about Malta. They agree to sponsor three days at the end of the trip if I promise to write about food and agricultural tourism, an area in which they are campaigning. This is complicated for me because I see how crowded Valletta is becoming and I see how modern tourism is already changing this place, and I am not sure I want to contribute to that. But I go. At one point on our busy itinerary, I meet Rikkardu, a ġbejniet cheese maker and restauranteur from one of Malta’s sister islands, Gozo. He has a giant salt-and-pepper beard and his restaurant is also called Rikkardu, so he’s easy to remember. During our private tour of his kitchen, I watch as he puts the sheep’s cheese into glass bottles of brine and peppercorns, and I think about the fact that the pastizzi is not famous, not like the croissant or the cannoli, pastries that are easily recognizable by almost anyone. The pastizzi is famous for almost no one. I decide not to write about pastizzi—I don’t know what to say about it yet—so I write about a farmer’s market, a cheese maker, and a sea salt farmer, instead.
At Home on Zoom, Tucson, Arizona, 2020
We are in the middle of a global pandemic, and I’m emailing with Turkish Airlines about refunding my ticket to our 15-year Malta reunion, which was supposed to be in May of 2020. In our WhatsApp chat, we’ve been posting pictures of what life looks like across our ten different countries, all of us working from home, not sure what is to come of the world. At 9 a.m. on a Friday, I click on the Zoom link I’ve sent everyone, and the virtual doorbell rings as each of us come in across the world. It’s 9 a.m. in Tucson, 12 p.m. in Boston, 6 p.m. in The Netherlands, Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, and Switzerland, 7 p.m. in Malta, and 1:30 the next day in Adelaide, and our little faces in boxes talk for three hours. Some of us have kids popping up in the background; some of us still live alone. So much is missing—there’s no sea air, no ricotta cheese, no dance clubs, no Mediterranean sun, no new stories about grumpy bus drivers who won’t stick to their schedules—but we’re all so concerned about the state of the world that we’re simply grateful to see each other this way, something that wouldn’t have been possible when we were still writing letters to each other across continents in 2004. This is the only reunion Matt returns to; the one without pastizzi.
Malta Joe’s Food Truck, Tucson, Arizona, 2020
Here in the Sonoran Desert, most people have never even heard of Malta, though our landscapes both have prickly pears and palm trees and dust. Imagine my surprise, then, on a Sunday morning at the Rillito farmers’ market, masks on our faces, Ryan and I park the car and see a red food truck with a big Maltese cross on it. “Oh my God,” I say, grabbing the stroller and popping our tiny son into it, “is that….?” We run over to it, and there, inside a long glass case, are rows and rows of pastizzis. Pea pastizzis, ricotta cheese pastizzis, blueberry pastizzis, a hot dog wrapped in pastizzi dough, and even—yes—a Southwest pastizzi with Hatch chiles and Mexican cheese. And there is a dark-haired man behind the counter who says ta and mela, words that have no meaning but that also mean everything from of course to yes to huh to ok? to a filler when you’re thinking. Mela, mela…you want a ricotta, ta? Malta Joe passes out more paper bags full of pastizzis to customers asking if they’re like empanadas (they’re not), and it reminds me of the expression jinbieghu bħal pastizzi, which means a coveted thing with an inexhaustible demand. Now my son waits all week for Sundays, so we can get pastizzis and sit in the sunshine together, and I wonder: Will he love Malta the way I do, too?
Cooking Class at Michela’s House, Malta, 2024
I am at Michela’s house wearing an apron with a picture of a pastizzi on it. Somehow, nearly two decades have passed and I’ve done most of the things I promised myself I’d do: I’ve graduated college, travelled the world, become a travel writer; and I’ve also done plenty of things I thought I would never do, like become a wife, a mom, lived through a pandemic that, coupled with those other two things, upended my life as a writer. Right now, I’m smearing pads of margarine all over a long, thin string of dough that I’ve made with a girl from Montreal, who’s more interested in filming content for her Instagram reel than making the recipe. Michela says that Maltese ricotta (which she calls irkotta) has a firmer, crumblier texture than its Italian cousin because it’s made from fresh cow’s milk instead of whey, which makes it perfect for thumbing into a mound and stuffing into pastries. And, she adds, the best filling is also mixed with the local cheese, the peppered cheeselet made from goat’s milk called ġbejniet, and warm spices, including nutmeg. I’ve seen a man make ġbejniet from scratch, and I never knew it was in a pastizzi. After we stuff the pastries, fold the dough over, pinch them closed, and stick them in the oven, we sit at the table and drink a soda made from orange bitters, and I can’t help but think about my friend Heidi, and how she swore she’d never eat another pastizzi because back in 2004, it gave her the worst food poisoning of her life. But when I get home that afternoon and slice up the pastizzi for everyone to try, she takes a big piece.
Valletta Food Tour, Malta, 2024
My friend Johanne and her boyfriend Marc have invited me to join them on a guided food tour of Valletta. We start out—where else could it be?—having pastizzis at Caffe Cordina, the same café where I sipped my first cappuccino and ate my first pastizzi before Valletta had become so modern, before they had replaced the lira with the euro, before they had discontinued all the quirky bright coloured buses with grumpy Maltese bus drivers for Ubers, before all the ancient ruins had been covered up in canopies and cordoned off so people wouldn’t climb on the tombs and sacrificial altars like we used to, in the days when we had to find an internet café to send an email or a big red phone booth to make a phone call. Time is like an accordion, isn’t it? Some days, I still feel like I just stepped foot onto Malta for the first time—full of curiosity, excitement for the future, inquisitive—and as we walk the streets on our food tour, I realize I’ve already had the pastizzi, the tuna sandwich, the rabbit stew, the Maltese prickly pear liquor and the peppered cheeselet chocolate, all the stops on our food tour. What is new, though, is an appreciation for the history of this strange little island, and how, had certain things never transpired, there would be no Caravaggio, no 200-year-old café, no pastizzi (which, by the way, comes from an old Italian recipe that came to Malta in the 1500s with the Order of St. John), no version of me sitting here eating chocolate in a cafe in Valletta.
Exiles Beach Club, Sliema, Malta, 2024
Three of us are sitting on recliners at Exiles and talking about that summer. Exiles, the thatched-roof bar we loved so much, is now Exiles, a beach club with a DJ. “Why does this place call us back?” my friend Magda asks, pulling taut the tape on her newly inked arm emblazoned with a Maltese cross. “Why is it that whenever I am here, I feel like I’m home?” None of us have a particularly compelling answer. None of us are Maltese, not by birth, heritage, or marriage. We don’t lay claim to this place in any real way, we can’t call it ours. But as I stretch out and look out at the Sliema skyline, a mash-up of crumbly beige high-rises, Italian cafes, and that one blue skyscraper, I feel it is also mine. If I hadn’t gone to Malta in 2004, I might never have found the bravery to move to Arizona to become a writer and my future would not have been my current life. Suddenly, I wonder about our twenty-five, thirty, forty, fifty, and if we are lucky, sixty-year reunion, and I realize that at this rate I may only get to Malta six or seven more times in my lifetime. I push the thought out of my mind because I can’t handle it. I go back to thinking about why this place calls me back. Something happened in Malta in 2004 that, I know, can’t and shouldn’t ever be recreated. That’s not why I come back to Malta. Malta is my commitment—a commitment to a life accidentally forged twenty years ago on an island that just happens, by the way, to have the best pastry in the world.
