A thick broad bean dip, some galletti, and about four hundred years of making a great deal out of very little.
Bigilla is what happens when a small island decides that dried broad beans are going to be delicious, and then simply makes it true through effort.
Ful tal-ġirba, soaked and slowly cooked down, mashed thick with garlic, parsley, olive oil, a little chilli. Eaten with galletti — the hard round water biscuits that exist mainly to carry it.
Peasant food, in the honest sense
It costs almost nothing to make and it is one of the most distinctly Maltese things on any table. That is not a coincidence. The dishes that survive on this island are the ones that fed people through summers with no refrigeration and centuries with no money.
It still turns up at every gathering, in the middle, disappearing faster than anything more expensive next to it.
Put bigilla on a table of twelve and watch what goes first.
Photo: Silvana.Bugeja / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Bigilla is what happens when a small island decides that dried broad beans are going to be delicious, and then simply makes it true through effort.
Ful tal-ġirba, soaked and slowly cooked down, mashed thick with garlic, parsley, olive oil, a little chilli. Eaten with galletti — the hard round water biscuits that exist mainly to carry it.
Peasant food, in the honest sense
It costs almost nothing to make and it is one of the most distinctly Maltese things on any table. That is not a coincidence. The dishes that survive on this island are the ones that fed people through summers with no refrigeration and centuries with no money.
It still turns up at every gathering, in the middle, disappearing faster than anything more expensive next to it.
Put bigilla on a table of twelve and watch what goes first.
Photo: Silvana.Bugeja / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
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