Green cakes from Valletta

• By Daphne Caruana Galizia

My childhood memories include regular battles with my sisters over who was going to get the pasta ħadra in the box of assorted pastries brought back from Valletta by my father, who grew up round the corner from Croce Bonaci’s bakery. To this day, I cannot understand why he didn’t put an end to the rows by bringing home nothing but pasti ħodor, but I think it has something to do with the principle of getting us used to variety. The net result of this failed experiment is that still, whenever I see a pastra ħadra I have to fight back to urge to revert to childhood and pounce on it before my sister Corinne does – the other two were smaller in size - even though she may be nowhere around, and even though it sticks to my teeth in a manner most unseemly for somebody of my age and station in life. When, on a whim, I decided to pop into Croce Bonaci’s bakery some weeks ago, I had not come across a pasta ħadra – or pasta tal-ħġieġ as they are sometimes called, because of the hard shell of glassy caramel – for years. Had they been put out of production, because of changing tastes?

I bumped into Croce Bonaci, grandson of the eponymous confectioner who, with his brothers Cikku, Gigi and Toni, ran the Café Premier to which I owe my existence, given that it was where the 17-year-old boy who went on to become my grandfather first caught sight of the 14-year-old girl who went on to become my grandmother. Croce told me that they rarely make pasti ħodor anymore, because particular kinds of weather conditions are required: cool weather and no riħ isfel, as otherwise the caramel that makes for the typical ‘glass’ shell will not set. Also, customer tastes have changed, and it seems that the only people who now rush to buy them on the few occasions that they appear in the shop are those for whom they evoke nostalgia – like me. Another appears to be our photographer Pippa Zammit Cutajar, who got to taste the batch shown in the photograph. They were specially prepared for the picture on a day when the humidity neared 100% and the caramel melted right off before the camera. She shared my verdict: though delicious, these modern pasti ħodor are unlike the ones we remember from childhood. Those were defined by their vivid green colouring, produced by something that is probably banned now under EU food rules. Beneath this perfectly smooth and glassy caramelized marzipan lid, there was a layer of cream and beneath that, a slice of light sponge cake. The new variety has a paler green lid that does not satisfy my need for the vulgar green of old, and a richer confection beneath. Instead of the ordinary toothpick that used to stick out of the green glassy shell, there is now a sophisticated ‘cherry’. Food nostalgia demands that something is exactly the same as it was in childhood, so these disappointed in that respect, despite the fact that they were better crafted and richer in taste.

I have always thought of my much-loved pasti hodor as being typical of Valletta, because that is what they are to me - but they are in reality a traditional Sicilian confection, and when Corinne and Pippa took a trip to Sicily to visit some food production houses, they saw them being made (see the feature beginning on page 14 of this issue). Croce told me that Cikku Bonaci came back with the recipe after a visit to Sicily just after “the war” – this being referred to in the definitive, as the only war in which the Maltese were directly involved, and hugely so, in living memory. They made the cakes and sold them at the Café Premier, and they were an instant hit. Though they were marketed under the name of pasti tal-karamella, they soon became known as pasti tal-ħġieġ (‘glass’ cakes), or pasti ħodor (green cakes).

Changing tastes, together with the lack of familiarity among those who never encountered them while growing up – and who are shocked as a result that anyone can find it possible to eat something so vividly green and so hostile to the teeth – have put my favourite pasti hodor out to pasture, more or less for good. Somewhere in cake limbo they float for the rest of time, meeting and greeting with Mrs Beeton’s 10-egg cakes and 1960s pink packet custard. I shall go on missing them.