Sugar and spice and all things culinary, I can’t for the life of me remember when I discovered I was a girl. It must have been quite early though. The Bro, who came into this mad world hollering and jostling for attention three and a half years after I did, had a little appendage and I didn’t. Freud’s theory of penis envy never applied. I just thought the whole thing was useless. Why show off when you can be discreet?

Many many years later I had my first stab of sexual discrimination based on nothing other than I was female. Incidentally, I still am. Full of hope that a culinary course would free me from the tyranny of waiting on tables – which, incidentally and perversely, I loved – I turned up at a St. Julians’ restaurant where I had worked before, and asked the manager for a job in the kitchen.

He sent me down to the cave, unaccompanied and unadorned. The chef, a five foot five Maradona lookalike, took one glimpse at my frame, and told me they weren’t looking. Three days later, a vacancy for the position I had been asking for appeared in The Times. He had never asked me to even chop an onion for him. In fact, his precise words were “You couldn’t carry a pot of hot water”. If he’d clubbed me on the head with a rolling pin and dragged up the steps, he’d have been kinder.

I was incensed. Any other reason would have done, but to use my biceps as an excuse was the pits, especially since I was probably stronger than half his dope-smoking staff. Eventually, it was a British chef, flown over from the UK to set-up a local branch of a chic chain of restaurants, who trusted me, quite blindly, to perform. ‘My sister is an excellent chef’ he told me ‘and I’ve seen the way she’s been discriminated against. I vowed never to do the same thing myself to others’.

And perform I did. My little enclave was the pastry section. It may not have been Michel Roux’s kitchen, but the pride I felt at churning out apple after banoffee pie, day after day, was indescribable. I was the only one to turn up in gleaming whites evening after evening, to fill in for errant sous chefs who found more solace in heroin than in the fryer, and to watch open-mouthed as Chef spun sugar and smoked salmon in the shaft.

Every night, I was so full of energy after an 8 hour stint in a blazing hot kitchen that instead of going back home to sleep, I’d hang around with a drink and a cigarette trying to wind down. Until this day, slogging in a kitchen has been the only job that didn’t leave me feeling exhausted. Whether it was cleaning out the cavernous fridge because the rest of the staff thought placing meat on top of vegetables was fine or frying one potato after another, I felt constantly thrilled.

I made quite a few discoveries that year, and I’m still making them now. Regardless of how molested you are as a waitress by the kitchen staff (and believe me, I’ve seen enough shenanigans in restaurant kitchens to end eighty percent of marriages) nobody messes with you when you’re wielding at ten inch cook’s knife. I also continue to see the rise of male chefs, and the edging out of distinctive female ones.

And just in case you were wondering, hardly anyone carries huge pots of boiling water in a kitchen, especially since most pasta restaurants are equipped with boilers with automatic drainers. Lugging them around would be extremely dangerous whether you’re male or female, and if it has to be done, there will usually be a porter who’ll carry out the job. Having come from years of lifting boxes in my dad’s business, physical work was not gruelling, but a release. There is no reason why we shouldn’t have more women preparing our food. They were, after all, the ones that provided our first sustenance, and continue to do it for a good chunk of our lives.

The cup is not half empty though. In other spheres of the food world, women in Malta are constantly making their voices heard, and they do it through books. Over the past couple of years, ninety five percent of food books published locally have been by women. The Maltese food bible ‘The Food and Cookery of Malta’ was written by Anne and Helen Caruana Galizia, Matty Cremona produced a fabulous historical treatise of local ingredients and their recipes last year, and Pippa Mattei put her hearth and sole into ‘Twenty Five Years of a Maltese Kitchen’. For years, the favourite tv chefs and good food promoters were not the males sent by hotels to promote their work place, but Gloria Mizzi and Carmen Tedesco. Two weeks ago, I even stopped the car half-way home to take down a recipe Gloria was giving on the radio. How’s that for fan-dom?

In many restaurant kitchens in Italy and Tunisia, the chirrupy voices of females producing fabulous food is a mainstay, not an oddity. And in Gozo, Martin’s diner has plastic covers and food ‘prepared by fully-trained housewives’ on its menu. Women in kitchens, in fact, seem to be more prevalent in the sister island, than they are here. They are doing a wonderful job at Maxokk in Nadur.

Nadur is famed for its football team and its histrionic and mad carnival, akin to that of a small village gone berserk for a few days a year. In February, men dressed as women flash at whoever will watch them, and parade madly down ‘it-trojq tal-korneval’. Running around the streets bearing heads of pigs, wearing masks so that they’re not even recognisable to each other is the disorder of the day. It is during these few days of madness that the Maltese discover the little hole in the wall populated by females and one lone male.

If we want to be simple, Maxokk is a take-away. If we don’t, it’s a hedonistic trip down the street of how food should taste, and how it used to be made. Orders have to be placed the day or at least a few hours before pick-up, and believe me they are. When I was there, one man was picking up 12 different ftajjar and gently placing them in the boot of his car like they were his children, while everyone else salivated in a slave-like fashion at the emanating smells of rising dough and baking ingredients.

Maxokk is a simple as they come: a totally female multi-tasking enclave. Once inside the plastic fly curtain, as you let your eyes adjust to the darkness, you’re enveloped by the warm fuzzy smell of a bakery. The lone male takes and checks orders while the women – one mum, and a couple of daughters – knead, mix, stuff and throw one ingredient after the other on the elastic dough before they pop it into their wood-burning oven.

The result is the best ‘pizza’ I’ve ever eaten locally, and the closest I’ve come to the pizza al taglio from the worker’s bar in Piazza Torre Argentina in Rome. They call it a ‘ftira’ but as far as I know, a ftira is a leavened bun. This dough is more akin to a cross between brioche and pizza. Its soft yet crisp outcome from the oven, the chewy body full of small airy holes, and the mix of ingredients which blend so beautifully with it, are the reason why I threw my Atkins book out of the window, at least for the half hour it took me to demolish the food.

My choices were those of Local Cheese and Olives, but there are another five types available. The Local Cheese one is made of gbejniet, still oozing their last attempts at milk, creamy potatoes enveloped in grated cheese and eggs. It was wondrous, gooey, real and fleshy and everything a local product should be. The ftira with olives was a carnival of colour and taste, and even if the olives were probably pre-sliced, the end result is a little jolt to the system, to be consumed as quickly as possible after it comes out of the oven. Perhaps in the way I did it, sitting in the car, wondering if there still exists a quiet out of the way spot in Gozo. The photo, incidentally, is of the olive ftira in the two seconds it spent modelling on my dashboard.

Places like Maxokk need to be wrapped in gold gauze and treasured. They – not their imitators – are preserving and producing local fare much to our continued delight. I wonder what will happen to places like this once the new EU restrictions on food production, transport, packaging and display come into play. As we go to print, I’m waiting for MIC to get back to me with an answer. The last thing EU regulations will do, though, is get our women back into professional kitchens where they belong.