A pennyworth of kunserva
Our corner shop was King Store, a fact proclaimed in proud letters above the pale-blue-shuttered shop front, where Pippa Toledo’s interior design offices stand today. Nobody ever used the name. Instead, we spoke of going to Musé. Sometimes we would go to Toni, whose tiny shop once stood where the fashionable hairdresser Pierre Camille works his magic today. That was in emergencies only; our mother disapproved of his hygiene standards.
I watched in knobby-kneed fascination, as Musé dealt with the quibbling demands, a child relegated to the back of the queue of women, all of them bristling with baskets, purses and lists, and rapidly made a mental note to become a hippie in purple pants and a fringed headband. Woodstock had long come and gone, but I would try anyway: anything to avoid the destiny of a tartan wheelie basket. While I looked at the padded Disney characters that came free with Knorr packet soups, Musé would take down a huge tin, and with an air of supreme patience spoon out precisely nofs-kwart of kunserva onto pre-cut squares of greaseproof paper, weighing it out on old-fashioned scales using brass weights. The sloppy red paste would be ceremoniously wrapped up and handed to the customer along with her nofs kwart of perżut, her ħalib tal-bott and her ħobza tar-ratal.
Between 1973 and marriage, there was a hiatus in which I never shopped for groceries or bothered to discover how cooked food appeared on the table. That’s what parents were for. So the first time I went to the mini-market armed with a shopping-list, freshly incarnated as a bewildered householder, I asked the man behind the cheese counter for kunserva by weight. It was 1985 and the last time I had gone shopping for food, aged 8 or so, this was how I had seen it traded. The man behind the delicatessen counter was very blunt. “What?” he said. “I’ve never heard of it.”
Martin Borg of Vernon Foods, a company that has been making kunserva since the 1950s, says that sugar is a fairly recent addition to the tomato concentrate. The kunserva they made in the early days had no sugar, but Maltese tastes have developed in such a way that sugar is now essential to make it palatable. Ironically, it is that sugar which makes kunserva particularly Maltese, and puts it in a different category to tomato concentrates made in other parts of the Mediterranean, including the Naples region in Italy. Because of this, Maltese kunserva has scored special status with the European Commission, which has declared it to be a traditional and well-defined Maltese food product. Farmers who grow tomatoes for kunserva production are eligible for EU aid. Kunserva, which is a truncated form of kunserva tad-tadam, should now be called by this very name, without any attempt at translating it into the not-quite-accurate ‘tomato purée’ or ‘tomato concentrate’.
Today, tomatoes are the second most important cash crop for growers; the most important is still potatoes. One kilo – roughly 12 tomatoes – renders just 250g of kunserva. The fruit is picked entirely by hand, which means, says Vernon’s Martin Borg, that soil does not enter the product, as it does when the plants are shaken by mechanical harvesters and the fruit falls to the ground.
Now kunserva is being packed in smart, glass jars, in response to consumer demand. “It’s much more convenient for people,” says Mr Borg, whose kunserva is sold under the Vera brand. “Before, they would have had to open a tin and transfer the unused amount to another container. This is a lot better, though the tins are as popular as ever.” The French news website Courrier International has just broken the news in its ‘Epices & Saveurs’ section: “La kunserva fait sa sauce” (read the article here or here). Indeed it does. As I have learnt since 1985, it is practically impossible to cook traditional dishes without it. Oh, and the glass jars are a far cry from the half-pennyworth in greaseproof paper.