Pork, vegetables, and a pot big enough that nobody needs to ask whether there is more.
Kawlata is less a recipe than a method for making a large amount of food out of a moderate amount of ingredients, which is the founding principle of most Maltese cooking.
Pork, cabbage, potato, carrot, marrow, beans, sometimes a piece of ġbejna at the end. Simmered until everything has taken on everything else's character and the whole pot tastes like one thing rather than eight.
The pot is the point
Nobody makes kawlata for two. It is made in a quantity that assumes people will turn up, and it improves on the second day, which assumes they will turn up again.
It belongs to exactly now — the month when the evenings are cold enough to want it and the winter vegetables are at their best.
A soup you can eat with a fork is not a soup. It is dinner.
Photo: Continentaleurope / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Kawlata is less a recipe than a method for making a large amount of food out of a moderate amount of ingredients, which is the founding principle of most Maltese cooking.
Pork, cabbage, potato, carrot, marrow, beans, sometimes a piece of ġbejna at the end. Simmered until everything has taken on everything else's character and the whole pot tastes like one thing rather than eight.
The pot is the point
Nobody makes kawlata for two. It is made in a quantity that assumes people will turn up, and it improves on the second day, which assumes they will turn up again.
It belongs to exactly now — the month when the evenings are cold enough to want it and the winter vegetables are at their best.
A soup you can eat with a fork is not a soup. It is dinner.
Photo: Continentaleurope / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
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