Bakeries & Bakers in Cottonera
- Warren J Bugeja
- Mar 28
- 9 min read
Updated: Apr 14
(written for an audience aged 10+)
Throughout the history of Malta, making sure there was enough grain to feed everyone was always a big worry for the rulers of the islands. The farmers in Malta could only grow enough cereal to feed about a third of the people, so they had to bring in a lot of grain from Sicily without having to pay taxes on it. If the harvest was bad, it could cause a lot of problems like high prices, people going hungry and even rebellions.
Back in Medieval times, a public announcement called a bando, invited people, even women and nuns, who were interested in investing to join in the grain trade. Birgu was one of three towns which had a self-governing council (Università), which was really important in managing these investments. They gave money to the owners of ships so they could buy and bring back grain from Sicily, which was part of the same kingdom as Malta.
Later the Knights of St John tried to keep the prices steady. They even stored grain in warehouses in Sicily and Marseille to make sure there was always enough. There's a saying in Malta that goes, “Malta qatt ma rrifjutat qamħ” (Malta never refused any wheat), which shows how important it was to make sure there was always enough grain around.
However, when the British government introduced a ‘free-trade,’ policy (which meant anyone could import wheat and sell it at the prices they wanted to), it changed how things worked for buying and selling grain in Malta. This made the prices of grain go up and down a lot, making it harder for people to afford food. Finally, on June 7th, 1919, British soldiers shot at Maltese people who were protesting in Valletta.
During World War II, Sicily couldn't help Malta with food anymore because they were on the enemy’s side. To make the little food they had last longer, bakers had to use a mix of different kinds of flour. They mixed some wheat flour from Canada (25%), some barley flour from Malta (25%), and some from maize (50%), which is like corn. As the war went on, they even used flour made from potatoes and anything else they could find to grind up.
Most people in the past ate a lot of bread along with some other basic foods like cheese made from sheep’s or goat’s milk, onions, olives, salted fish, oil, eggs, vegetable soup (minestra), and whatever fruits were in season. The kind of bread they ate could tell you something about how much money they had. Rich people ate white bread made from really good flour, while poor folks ate a mix of wheat and barley bread (ħobż tal-maħlut), which was darker and not as fancy. In fact, Inquisitor Fabio Chigi (1634-1639) refers to the country people as eaters of barley bread. There was even a saying that asked, “x’ħobż jiekol dan ?” (What type of bread does he eat?) to find out how well-off someone was. So, the type of bread you ate could show where you stood in society.
Back in 1590, about one-third of the people (around 10,000) in Malta lived near the harbour, and by the 1750s, it was even more crowded, with about forty percent of the population there. In the town of Qormi, known as ‘Casal Forno’ there were lots of bakers who made bread. They supplied bread to sellers in Valletta, along with the bread made at a bakery run by the Order of St John. This bakery in Valletta made over 26,000 loaves of bread every month just for the ‘Sacra Infermeria’ (the Order’s hospital). After Valletta, Cospicua was the next most self-sufficient town near the harbour. We know about a baker named Leonardo Abate who sold fresh bread to Gioanne Lopes, a new resident in Cospicua in 1603. The 1760 rollo (inventory) for Cospicua mentions four kneaders and four professional bakers. In 1784, Cospicua had five bakeries (called fornari), and Senglea had two. So, there were quite a few places making bread to feed everyone.
Back in 1593, there was a lady named Bartholomea de Milo who baked bread in her own oven in Cospicua. But that was pretty rare. You see, most people didn't have ovens in their homes like we do now. Instead, they went to bakeries where they could use the big ovens there. The bakers just looked after the ovens, while the villagers brought their own ingredients and made their bread together. They'd chat and share news while they worked, which helped them become closer as a community. The bakers got paid with thistles, which they used as fuel for the oven.
Families would also bring other dishes, like veggies or pies, from home to be cooked in the bakery's wood-fired ovens while they went to church. They'd get a metal peg to mark their dish, so they knew which one was theirs. Some places still do this today.
There were two windmills in Bormla, one in Triq San Ġwann t’Għuxa, known as tal-Maħruq, and the other on the Santa Margherita lines (consisting of two mills side by side) near the end of Triq il-Mitħna, in the northeast of Bormla. Both windmills were built in 1674, along with six others by the Cotoner Foundation. Grand Master Nicholas Cotoner and his brother created this foundation to help pay the soldiers at Fort Ricasoli. They did this by renting out the windmills and using the money for salaries. The miller used to keep the tools and the animals in the lower rooms whilst he and his family lived on the first floor.
In the 1800s, the Santa Margherita windmills started being used to grind corn. Previously, given their proximity to gunpowder magazines, they might have been used to grind charcoal. Records show that the Santa Margherita windmills were rented out to Matteo Fenech and his nephew in 1795. Under the British, they were rented out to Ġiuseppe Falzon and later to a miller, Bonavia from Naxxar. He was given the windmills to use for 100 years. The residents of Cospicua used the Santa Margherita windmill to grind grain into flour until 1916. Many years later, in 2010, its machinery was moved to the Xarolla Mill in Żurrieq. The windmill in San Ġwann T’Għuxa, used for the production of gunpowder, cost 1,200 scudi to build and was rented for 300 scudi a year. In 1809, lightning struck and damaged it, but it was repaired and started working again in 1832. The T’Għuxa windmill finally stopped working in 1879. Giacomo Bosio and Francesco Balbi da Correggio both mention a mill in Fort St Angelo in Birgu, which was operational in 1565, but this was actually a powder mill.
Two windmills can be seen in the 16th-century Great Siege wall paintings by d’Aleccio depicting Isla, located in the Grand Council Chamber of the Grand Master’s Palace in Valletta. According to Clifford Vella, in his book on windmills in Malta, these were the first wind-powered mills built on the Maltese Islands, and records show that they were operational between the years 1532 and 1631. Indeed, a plaque marks the foundation of a windmill erected by Grandmaster L-Isle Adam on Triq San Filippo, which can be dated to 1533. This raised part of Isla was referred to as Monte del Molino, which means ‘mount of the windmill’. It is most likely that these windmills were originally used as gunpowder mills, placed at the edge of the peninsula, around 120 metres away from Fort St Michael, as a precaution against explosion. The windmills were round and powered by four sails, very similar to those found in Rhodes, unlike later windmills built by the knights with square towers and with six sails. Some early maps of Isla feature three and not two windmills.
Between 1842 and 1845, a new steam-powered bakery was built by the military engineer William, replacing the Order’s old slipways. 17,500 rotoli (14,000 kg) of bread and biscuits fed the British Navy each day.
Up until recently, there were three bakeries in Birgu: one located at 27, Triq it-Tramuntana, known as il-Forn ta’ Ġorġ; another in Triq il-Majjistral; and the last to close, in Triq San Anton, referred to as il-Forn ta’ Gejtu or Cassar Bakery.
A bakery in Bormla in Triq il-Peligrinaġġ has now been taken over by a well-known Gozitan baker from Nadur, famous for their Gozitan Ftira (a sort of deep-pan pizza made with sourdough and filled with sheep’s cheese and baked potato slices), and renamed Forn tal-Għawdxi. There was once a bakery on Triq il-Vitorja in Isla, near San Filippu, which remained open until the late 1980s. Another bakery, located near the bus station, was eventually replaced by a police station. One more bakery, still in operation today in Isla, can be found on the street parallel to Triq San Ġiljan, overlooking the dockyards.
Watch Emanuel Cassar in his Birgu bakery talk about the future of bread making here:
Maltese bakeries are called ‘Il-Forn,’ which is also the name for the big oven they use. It's a huge, half-dome-shaped oven made of limestone, and it has a heavy metal door. Back in the old days, these bakeries also had a (mill) room where they ground up grains to make flour.
Baking usually starts late in the evening, around 9 p.m., and goes on until early morning, around 5 a.m. To get the oven really hot, they burn a fire in a special stone chamber next to it called a gali (which means gully). The oven gets as hot as 275 degrees Celsius!
In a Maltese bakery, there's a special person called the għaġġien (kneader) who mixes together flour, water, salt, and something called it-tinsila, which is a bit of (mother) dough left over from the day before that's been fermenting in water. In the summertime, they use less of this tinsila because the bread rises faster when it's warm, but they add more salt to make sure the bread stays fresh longer. In winter, they do the opposite.
After mixing, the dough has to sit and rise for about three hours This process is called ‘proving’. Then they cut it, weigh it, shape it into rounds, and sometimes make little cuts or crosses on the side or top. They put these on trays in rows called a triq (which means road in Maltese) and let them rise some more for an hour.The ħabbież then uses a palun tal-ħabża shaped like a giant oar to place the dough into the oven.
There's a special kind of bread called ftira that's flat and round with holes in the middle, which doesn’t need much time to rise. These go in the oven first because they need hotter temperatures but less time to bake, only about ten minutes. But the regular Maltese loaf, called "Ħobż tal-Malti," takes longer, about forty-five minutes. When the bread is done baking and smells deliciously smoky, they use a big paddle called palun tal-ħruġ to take it out of the oven.
Bakers have a funny joke about the person who loads the ovens (ħabbież) they say they're going to heaven when they die because they spend so much time in front of "the fires of hell" on earth! That's why they get paid more and work fewer hours than the people who knead and shape the dough.
In bakeries, besides the regular sourdough bread, they also make and sell all sorts of yummy treats like traditional biscuits (biskuttini tar-raħal), sweet aniseed rings (qagħaq tal-ħmira), bread sprinkled with sesame seeds, French bread (ħobż tal-Franċiż), and bread rolls (panini). But nowadays, many bakeries use electric ovens instead of the old wood-fired ones because the rules say the chimneys have to be a certain height, and they can't use wood painted with lead as fuel anymore.
Written with reference to:
Buttigieg, N. ‘Bread in Early Modern Malta: The Voice Within’. Published in ‘Welcome, The Journal of the Institute of Tourism Studies’ Issue no. 5, May 2010.
Buttigieg, N. ‘The Administration of the Order's Bakery: Some Preliminary Observations’ . Published in ‘Sacra Militia’, Issue no. 10, 2011.
Buttigieg, N. ‘Bread and the City: 1740-1798’. Published in ‘Sacra Militia’, Issue no. 13, 2014.
Buttigieg, N. ‘Breadways and Black-Market Intrigues in 1942 Malta’. Published in Global Food History, 7:3, 2021
Cassar, C. ‘State Intervention in the Grain Trade of Malta (16th-20th Century)’ by Carmel Cassar. Published in ‘Mediterranean Review’ Vol. 6, No. 2, December 2013.
Cremona, M. (2010) ‘The Way We Ate: Memories of Maltese Meals’ by Matty Cremona. Published by Midsea Books.
Mercieca, M., Muscat, M. (2013) ‘Windmills and the Production of Gunpowder in Malta’ bPublished in Symposia Melitensia Number 9
Radmilli. R. (1999)‘Ħobżna ta’ Kuljum: Qormi Bakeries and the Role of Bread in Society’ b. MA Qualifying Dissertation Anthropology, University of Malta.
‘L-Imtieħen tat-Tħin tal-Qamħ fil-Gzejjer Maltin’ by Clifford Vella, Printit Ltd, 2013.
‘Windmill Street’ Kottonera Foundation Website. Accessed February 2025: https://www.kottonera.mt/things_to_do/windmill-windmill-street/
‘Windmills’ Bormla Local Council Website. Accessed February 2025: https://bormlalc.gov.mt/en/historical-places/
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