Confessions of a meat-eater
I am one of those people who believe that meat is not just good for you, but very good. The meat-eaters with health and weight problems are those who eat meat to the virtual exclusion of everything else. They never eat fresh fruit. They rarely eat vegetables, and when they do, it’s out of a can or a freezer packet. They think a pulse is what the doctor takes when he’s trying to see whether you’re dead or alive, and they refer to leafy greens as ‘rabbit food’. Cereals are the sugary things with pictures of unusual animals on the packet, for children’s breakfast, and they never drink water because they don’t like it, so they consume crates full of soft drinks instead.
Too many people, despite not being vegetarians are now behaving as though a piece of red meat is the health equivalent of crack cocaine. Instead of eating a proper, balanced diet – which includes meat – and revelling in the pleasure of well prepared, good quality, simple food, they go through their days punishing themselves with a dietary hair shirt, denying themselves this, denying themselves that, raising their hands in horror at the very thought of melt-in-your-mouth Tuscan beef.
Learning about the joys of meat is a lot more difficult in Malta than learning about the joys of some more private matters. For years, there seems to have been a conspiracy to deny us access to good meat, and now that the flood-gates of choice have been opened, few know what to do about it.
Village butchers, accustomed all their working life to selling a kilo of ‘friża’ and ‘erba stejks għall-qali’, or a ‘biċċa porku għall-forn’, can’t get to grips with the real requirements of their trade, which butchers in continental Europe and Britain have taken for granted as part of their professionalism. Few people I know still go to the shops, and they regard me as a curiosity for doing so, and more so for going out of my way to visit my favourite butchers: Frans Grech at the Victory butcher’s shop, next door to the Labour Party Club in the main square at Naxxar, and Emmanuel Bezzina and his son Mark at the Stella Maris butcher’s shop, opposite the eponymous parish church in Sliema’s High Street. Most people have become accustomed to picking up packets of ready-cut frozen meat at their supermarket, along with the lavatory paper and the washing-powder. I do this sometimes when I am in a mad rush or need rapid freezer-fillers for difficult moments, but I regard this kind of shopping as a tedious burden devoid of the interest of looking over the various fresh cuts of meat at the butcher’s, discussing what’s best for a particular dish, and exchanging opinions about cooking-times and whether a tin is better than a clay pot for the purpose. The strange thing is that I remember my maternal grandfather doing this in the days of the Valletta suq, when its floor was covered in blood-soaked saw-dust and huge hanks of meat hung unrefrigerated from hooks, in scenes that we now know only from trips to North Africa. I was fascinated that so much discussion could take place over a piece of meat, and that two adult men could stand over it, examining it closely, before concluding the deal.
Good butchers are now like gourmet shops, with shelves full of interesting bottles of olive oil, jars of spices, racks of wine, and packets of herbs. They are inspiring in themselves. It is hard to be at a loss for ideas when you walk into a shop and look at a refrigerated counter piled high with heaps of freshly-made pork sausages, just-minced meat in loose piles like confetti (a far cry from the thin, frozen packets that perforce must be kept on standby), gammon, veal cutlets, beef for stews, pork for roasting, just the right cut for a bistecca Fiorentina. And the Bezzinas, of course, sell the best Florentine beef fillet you can find in Malta – I can vouch for that. Its price makes it something of a special-occasion treat, rather than everyday fuel, but what a treat. There are times when I think that it’s one of the best things to come out of Malta’s membership of the European Union.