Baked rice, minced meat, egg and cheese. The dish every Maltese household makes and no two households make the same way.
Ross il-forn is the dish Maltese people stop describing halfway through, because everyone in the room already knows and everyone in the room disagrees about the details.
Rice, minced beef and pork, tomato, egg, cheese, baked until the top goes properly dark. That much is settled. Everything else is a household matter.
The part people argue about
Some add curry powder — a British inheritance nobody quite wants to admit to. Some insist on peas. Some bake it until the edges are almost burnt, which is correct, and some take it out early, which is not.
It belongs to Sunday, and to the day after Sunday, because ross il-forn is one of those rare dishes that is better cold from the fridge at four in the afternoon than it was hot.
Every Maltese person thinks their mother's version is the real one. They are all right.
Photo: Continentaleurope / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Ross il-forn is the dish Maltese people stop describing halfway through, because everyone in the room already knows and everyone in the room disagrees about the details.
Rice, minced beef and pork, tomato, egg, cheese, baked until the top goes properly dark. That much is settled. Everything else is a household matter.
The part people argue about
Some add curry powder — a British inheritance nobody quite wants to admit to. Some insist on peas. Some bake it until the edges are almost burnt, which is correct, and some take it out early, which is not.
It belongs to Sunday, and to the day after Sunday, because ross il-forn is one of those rare dishes that is better cold from the fridge at four in the afternoon than it was hot.
Every Maltese person thinks their mother's version is the real one. They are all right.
Photo: Continentaleurope / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
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