This Week 07/07/2002

What a week!

Matty Cremona tells Ramona Depares about her first cookery book, dedicated completely to olive oil to be released later this month

I’ve always enjoyed cooking, as much as I enjoy reading. So of course, it’s only natural that my first book should be a cookery one. Throughout these years I’ve learnt a lot about olive oil – with my husband having revived the art of olive pressing in Malta, this is hardly surprising – and the subject fascinates me. After all, we’re bang in the middle of the Mediterranean, a region known for producing exquisite olives and olive oil. The question I’ve always asked myself is: why on earth did the Maltese stop producing olive oil? It’s a known fact that we definitely used to press olives under the Romans. No history book provided a credible explanation why the art should have suddenly stopped being practiced. And so I took it upon myself to find out.

Which I did – it’s all there in the book, together with tons of recipes (related to olive oil, of course) and some really fascinating info about how to grow olives, harvest them and press them.

Maltese olive oil is simply fantastic, it’s taste is incredibly versatile and you can do anything with it.

Considering that this is my first book, it did not take me too long to write. Perhaps it’s because I love the subject and am very familiar with it. The book contains no meat recipes and there’s a very good reason for this: I really wanted to dedicate this first work completely to olive oil and you don’t really cook meat in that! Except for marinating it, perhaps, but again you hardly need a recipe. I don’t think I have a favourite recipe from the lot, I love all of them. The recipes are completely original. No copying from another recipe book for me, all the recipes were tried, tested and perfected by myself.

Of course, I do spend a lot of my time cooking. Different months bring with them different specialities: so between December and February I will concentrate on the marmalades and citrus jams. By March I start gathering the strawberries and the other berries and then beginning of Summer it's time for the apricots and other Summer fruit. We have so many fruit trees it would be a pity to let them go to waste and in reality, making jams is ridiculously easy once you try your hand at it. You just put the same weight of stoned summer fruit and water, cook the fruit, boil it, add sugar and boil it to setting point. Jams take about a year and a half to reach their optimum taste. Strawberry jam is the most difficult, because strawberries do not set immediately.

With a garden as big as ours, there is such a lot to do: drying tomatoes, bottling kappar (I have all kinds of interesting recipes for those) and even preparing artichoke hearts in sottolio. The homemade version tastes so much better than the tinned ones you buy. Come to think of it, we get most of our food fresh from the garden, you’d be surprised at the amount of produce we get through.

Back to my book, it’s also interesting to note that olive oil is not just a delicious addition to any recipe, it also works wonders in the beauty department. After all, one Frenchwoman who reached the ripe old age of 104 famously attributed her lack of wrinkles to olive oil.

Living in Wardija is great fun: lovely walks, pure air, nature and all that are in abundance. And breeding peacocks and emus is just as interesting: I mean, I might be sitting quietly having a coffee in the living room when suddenly two peacocks decide to wander in. You have to be so careful not to cause them any panic, or they will just wreck everything in sight! Life is certainly not very predictable at the Cremona home! The emus have just had their babies, which is very sweet and there is a duck colony as well, very cute. On the practical side, this also means that I have a great supply of eggs to cook with. Being surrounded by all this natural bounty, I am bound to turn to cooking.

Something else that I enjoy tremendously is having guests at home. Like I said, we can feed guests from our garden, except for the flour! But I do make the bread myself and on baking days the smell wafting through the house is simply amazing.

I’m already working on my second book. I won’t spill the beans just yet, but of course there will be a historical angle to it. The past is simply riveting, in fact I’ve devoured all local Melitensia and can hardly wait for Wettinger’s latest. I have the whole of Patrimonju’s collection and I never tire of them. Which means that I’m very pleased at the fact that my daughter, Liz, also enjoys reading. I encourage her, of course. I must say that my second book is stealing a lot of my reading time, it involves a lot more research than this one. Not that I’m not enjoying it, mind you.

How would I spend an ideal day? That one’s very easy. If life were to be stripped of all the hard work, you’d find me spending a leisurely morning cooking for guests, having a swim afterwards and then spending the afternoon reading and writing. Then it’d be off to bed early – after a lovely dinner and some good wine, of course. And I mustn’t forget lots of cuddling with Lizzy and my husband Sammy.

At the moment life is pretty hectic and exciting. Naturally I cannot wait for the book to come out on the market, it should be launched any time now, probably within the next two weeks. Waiting for the whole procedure of proofing, printing etc was rather tough on the nerves. But finally the work seems to be coming to fruition.

And then I can finally devote all my attention to second book.