QORMI - The Village of Bakers

by Dr Joseph F. Grima

Every country produces its own, unique type of bread. Malta is no exception to this norm and the village of Qormi has long been well-known as the “village of bakers” that provides the bulk of Maltese bread which it still does. In fact, Qormi has been quoted in official documentation as Casal Fornaro as far back at the first years of the seventeenth century. When, on 23rd April 1623, Grand Master Antoine de Paule visited Qormi on the occasion of the titular feast of St George, there was among the officials who accompanied him the Grand Prior of St John's Conventual Church (now the co-Cathedral), Reverend Salvatore Imbroll, who wrote an account of this visit and referred to Qormi as “the village called Curmi or of the bakers”.
The real reason why there was such a concentration of bakeries at Qormi is unknown and no documentation testifying to this fact has ever been unearthed. Tradition deems otherwise because it is held that, since Qormi in those days was very close to the large stagnant pools of Marsa which were only really drained in the nineteenth century, the village was prone to malaria (derived from the Italian mal'aria which literally means bad air) as it was believed that disease flourished in foul air. It was believed that smoke from the chimneys of bakeries would blow away this disease and so it was decreed that bakeries should be build in the area.
The whole idea is an old wives' tale pure and simple but it is a fact that this story was believed and written down in Gian Francesco Abela's 1647 publication of Della Descrittione di Malta, our island's first history written by a Maltese. Abela even went so far as to ascertain that, in olden times, the inhabitants of Qormi were very pale, some of them even deformed, but that the clean air generated by the local bakeries had improved their health no end. What is more important is what Abela wrote about the contemporaray Qormi bakeries: that they provided bread for the auberges of the Knights, for the palaces of the nobility and for many inhabitants of Valletta. This was a real fact and certainly not fiction. One may here add that, from the reports of the seventeenth century Maltese Episcopal Visits, it is known that the side altar of Our Lady of Graces in the Qormi parish church was, at least until 1656, in the care of the local weighers, millers and bakers. This means that these people were an important part of the local community.
Way back in the Middle Ages, the Maltese produced their own cereal grains which gave them a large measure of self-sufficiency. After harvesting and threshing was over, the villagers would cart their year's supply to the local windmill – some even had their own quern for hand-grinding or a mill rotated by a beast of burden for grinding corn known as a mithna tal-miexi – for conversion into flour and meal and then baked their own bread for the family. Professional bakers only started operations in the Late Middle Ages when governments passed laws to govern the size, the quality and the price of bread. Kneading was made by hand through pressing and turning the dough in large stone basins. However, home baking did not die out and, every week, housewives used to knead their bread at home in a large earthenware basin known as a zingla and then take it to the local baker after marking their dough with a personal motif so they would recognise their loaves which normally weighed two rotolos, about 1.6 kilos, each since smaller loaves became stale more easily. Eventually, it was deemed more practical to buy ready-made loaves from the bakeries and avoid the trouble of kneading at home.
Qormi was part and parcel of this practice but, in contrast with other villages, the number of bakeries became very great and led, as has been noted, to the village being called Casal Fornaro, or rather the “village of bakers”. This was not just a nickname but became common usage in official documentation as well throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries till the end of the rule of the Order of St John with the names Casal Curmi and Casal Fornaro becoming synonymous. To quote one official example, the Qormi militia regiment is listed in 1738 as Il Regimento Casal Fornaro. In 1743, Qormi was given the honorific title of Citta' Pinto, thus adding a third name. However, what is also interesting is the fact that, in the documentation dealing with the request for a title, there is written that at Qormi there were 100 bakeries and a great number of bakers and this at a time when agriculture was the main economic factor of the village.
In the nineteenth century, the nomenclature of Casal Fornaro was discontinued but the bakeries and bread-kneading remained very important in the economy of the village. A cursory look at the 1861 census reveals that at Qormi there were 486 kneaders of bread (175 males and 311 females) together with 33 bakers (19 males and 14 females). The total number of kneaders in the Maltese islands was 710 which means that 68.5% of them were based in Qormi. By time, their numbers decreased but remained quite substantial all the same. In 1901, there were 165 Qormi inhabitants (83 males and 82 females) in the bread-making business, a number that increased to 186 persons (127 males and 59 females) in 1911. Presently, over 40% of Maltese bakeries are based in Qormi.
Nowadays, bread is bought from shops or directly from bakeries though quite a number of bread-vans still make the rounds. Before the advent of mechanised transport, bread was either sold from the bakeries or by means of a a large box on a horse-drawn cart, usually painted yellow together with the words Good Bread. This so-called karettun tal-hobz (literally meaning bread-cart) had several compartments for the storage of bread together with a drawer where the seller kept a set of weights ranging from an uqija (26.5 grammes) to wizintejn (7.9 kilos). A set of knives was always present together with a measuring scale appended from the upper side. Both were needed to cut pieces of bread to adjust the weight of the loaf being bought. Such carts are now museum pieces.
Up till about 1940, the commonest loaf was that known as tal-mahlut, or mischiato, which was made from a mixture of corn and barley that were sometimes mixed after milling. However, the best mischiato (or mahlut) was obtained from corn and barley sown together and later also crushed together. The end result had an unpleasant colour but it was nourishing and full of flavour. It has not been available since the Second World War. Other types of bread available from Qormi are pthe common Maltese loaf in varying sizes, a pan loaf known as tal-kexxun, and the disc-like flat bread known as ftira. Improvements in commercial production has made possible the development of many varieties of bread which vary in shape, flavour and preparation, the two commonest being a long, narrow crusty French loaf (tal-Franciz) and a kind of fancy English bread (ta' l-Ingliz).

The Evolution of Bread

by Noel Buttigieg

The Malta populace were, and still are, mass consumers of bread and sundry grain products. Their body derived most of its calories from this staple food. The central position of bread in their daily lives also became the very centre of social, political and economic life. Although not unique within this framework, this Mediterranean society was often controlled, if not held hostage, by the importance of procuring the daily bread and the omnipresent fear of hunger.

In the case of Malta, these challenges were magnified for several obvious reasons. The scarce natural resources marginalized the island’s ability of provisioning itself. This immediately meant that provisioning depended exclusively on imports particularly from Sicily. When the source experienced scarcity, the islanders faced the imminent danger of hunger. In adverse conditions, the government of the island even adopted forced provisioning by confiscating grain cargoes from any ships calling into the Grand Harbour or plying within the vicinity of the archipelago.

Thus, what often had been described as a narrow and monotonous diet by several contemporary foreign accounts, is strictly conditioned by all those variables which imperiled provisioning, production, rationing and distribution of bread. It is exactly the understanding of these variables that the Bread Festival attempted to achieve over the past years.