About Nanette: Maltese and Mediterranean Cooking
A home cook's notebook of Maltese tradition, Mediterranean home cooking, and the sweets and frozen desserts that keep a kitchen busy through the seasons.
Our Mission
I cook the way my family cooked, and I write it down before the details slip.
That's the whole point of this site. So much of Maltese food lives in the hands of people who never wrote a recipe in their lives — a pinch of this, a handful of that, a pot left on the stove until it smelled right. When you grow up watching someone make Maltese Kitchen staples by feel, you absorb the rhythm without ever measuring it. Then one day you want to make it yourself, and you realise nobody ever wrote the numbers down.
So I started measuring. I started timing things, weighing flour instead of scooping it, noting which substitutions actually worked and which ones quietly ruined a batch. The recipes here are the result: tested in a real kitchen, adjusted for the ingredients you can actually find, and explained the way I'd explain them to a friend standing next to me at the counter.
This isn't a museum of heritage food kept behind glass. It's a working kitchen. Some dishes are exactly as my grandmother made them on Gozo. Others have drifted over the years, picking up an idea from a Sicilian neighbour or an Australian market. I keep both, and I try to be honest about which is which.
Topics We Explore
The kitchen wanders, and so does the writing. Five areas keep coming back.
Maltese Kitchen
Island traditions, feast-day foods, and the family dishes that show up at every gathering. Expect honest notes on what these recipes meant on Gozo and how they travel to a kitchen far from home. Find these under Maltese Kitchen.
Italian, Sicilian & Mediterranean Mains
Savory home cooking from across the region — Italian and Sicilian classics, plus Greek and North African flavours that have always lived close to Malta. Browse Italian, Sicilian & Mediterranean Mains.
Baking, Pastry & Sweets
Tarts, biscuits, nut bakes, and the pastry methods behind them. Blind baking, proper short pastry, the small habits that decide whether a tart holds together. It all lives in Baking, Pastry & Sweets.
Ice Cream & Gelato
Homemade frozen desserts, nut-based flavours, and seasonal churns, with practical guidance on getting the most from a home ice-cream maker. See Ice Cream & Gelato.
There's a fifth thread too, less about recipes and more about place. My Melbourne Food & Travel Notes hold the observations — Australian produce, a meal that stuck with me, travel memories from Malta and Gozo, the long way food and memory tangle together. Some of those pieces never tell you how to cook anything. They just tell you why a dish matters.
What Makes This Perspective Useful
I'm not a chef. I want to say that clearly, because it shapes everything here.
What I have instead is two food cultures sitting in the same kitchen. There's the Maltese and Mediterranean tradition I grew up inside, and there's the Melbourne pantry I cook from now — different fruit, different seasons, a market where some Maltese ingredients simply don't exist. Bridging those two is the actual work, and it's where most cookbooks leave you stranded. A recipe that assumes you live a short walk from a Gozitan market isn't much help in suburban Australia.
So I test for the gap. When a traditional ingredient is hard to find here, I tell you what I substitute and how close it lands. When the Australian summer makes a dough behave differently than it would in a Maltese winter, I say so. The aim is a recipe that works in your kitchen, not just the one it came from.
A note on testing: Everything published here has been cooked in a home kitchen, often more than once. That said, ovens, humidity, and ingredients vary more than any single cook can account for — treat my times and temperatures as a tested starting point, then trust what your own senses tell you on the day.
The other thing I try to offer is context. Knowing that a particular sweet appears at a specific feast, or that a sauce changes shape between one village and the next, makes the cooking feel less like assembly and more like joining something older than yourself. That's the part I love most, and it's the part recipes usually leave out.
If something here helps you make a dish your own family will remember, then the notebook is doing its job. Questions and corrections are always welcome — you'll find me on the Contact page.