Lenten food
“On a Thursday night in October 1588, a group of German men who were a on grand tour of Europe sat in a Birgu inn that was run by a ‘Moorish’ woman called Aloisia. ‘Moorish’ defined a person of dark or black complexion, who may have been, at least originally, a Muslim. The Germans were celebrating a safe crossing from Sicily. Their carousing went on late into the night. They drank and they sang; they ate meat and chicken and they threw the bones out of the window, as was then the habit. The midnight threshold came and went and they continued to make merry. A pious soul informed on them to the Inquisitor at his palace nearby: it was Friday, and men were eating meat and drinking at Aloisia’s inn. The Inquisitor despatched his guards to arrest them, but another German who had found out what was happening got there first. He alerted them to the impending danger, helped them to hire a small boat, and off they sailed immediately, back to Sicily whence they came. Eating meat on fast-days constituted a heinous offence in Malta in the eyes of the Inquisitor and of the grandmasters. In the early period (1546 to 1581), the Inquisition instituted proceedings against 48 local people for breaking the laws of fasting and abstinence. At least 53 knights were tried for this offence during the rather longer period between 1564 and 1696. In the late 16th century, five knights were found guilty of “openly, without any extenuating circumstances and without permission” eating meat on a galley of the Order of St John, during Lent. They were jailed in the castle for two years.”
- Giovanni Bonello, Five Hundred Years of Inns and Taverns in Malta, 2005