We made day trips up the coast of Cap Corse, with its cliff-hanging towns and dizzying seaside views, detouring along the route des vins in the famous wine region of Patrimonio to stock up on local Muscat and procuring honey from Ponte-Leccia and olive oil from medieval Lama. We meandered lazily along the Strada di l’Artigiani, the “Route of the Artisans,” a government-supported community that includes small food producers, vintners, and a clutch of potters, knifemakers, jewelers, and bookbinders—even a luthier. At Chez François, the café in Speloncato, we listened to old men sing tragic Corsican songs in beautiful, soul-wrenching tenors. In Occhiatana, we bought delicate bowls and goblets from ceramic artist Isabelle Volpei.
Early one Saturday morning, we set out for the central market in Ajaccio. Here by the sea in Napoleon’s hometown, the air was fragrant with mint and cilantro and with the smoky tang of cured meats. Long tables displayed little cookies made with brocciu (a fluffy sheep’s-milk cheese) resting on chestnut leaves; wonderful chard-filled savory pastries; all manner of charcuterie—from wing-shaped pancetta to whole-leg hams—and more cheeses than we’d ever dreamed could exist. Stunned, we asked the counterwomen for help. “Fort ou frais?” they asked. (“Strong or fresh?”) The whole range, we said, buying up no fewer than seven. We demurred, however, on the chèvre “avec habitants”—a cheese so ripe that little, maggot-type worms had taken up residence inside. (The habitants, perhaps needless to say, would be relocated, picked out by hand, before the cheese was to be eaten.) Our favorite, Corsetin, was a plug of aged chèvre that when sliced in half looked like a tiny painting of a thunderstorm—all gray clouds and yellow threatening sky. It had a seductive silkiness and a deep-aged tang that numbed the tongue and heated us up in the manner of a good stiff drink.
Driving the narrow roads home, we dodged cows and spotted mushroom hunters with handfuls of fleshy chanterelles. We passed wild-boar hunters with their guns and their long-eared chiens de chasse. Occasionally, too, we came across the whole skins of wild boars hanging on fences in a most macabre fashion, as if the beasts, newly emaciated and grimacing, were marching along in single file.
Back in our little kitchen, we read Corsican cookbooks and pan-grilled tasty lamb chops. We roasted potatoes with olive oil, garlic, and lemon juice—a dish obviously cribbed from the Greeks—and grilled sausage to serve over chestnut pasta. The days passed. We panfried rougets; baked pasta tubes with parsley and brocciu; mashed garlicky baked eggplant into the local specialty known as caviar d’aubergines. In the afternoons, we lingered over picnics of cured meats, sharply fragrant cheeses, chestnut biscuits, and lusty regional wines.
One night, friends of our Paris contingent’s, José and Chantal, invited us for dinner at their modern home in Belgodère. They fed us sweet langoustines tossed with grapefruit, followed by the town’s calling card, wild pork (the boar had been shot by a friend a few days earlier) slow-roasted in wine with chestnuts. The meat was dark, almost black, and caramelized and crisped at its tips; the chestnuts soft, crumbling, hauntingly rich. Chantal baked a fiadone, a rustic, lemony cheesecake made from brocciu.
José, a native Corsican who recently retired as a military attaché for the United Nations, has lived and worked all over the world—Cambodia, Rwanda, Gaza, Bali—and yet he doesn’t find life in a hill town provincial. “You strike up a conversation in the café,” he said, “and find out your new friend lived for twenty years in China. Everyone here has gone away and come back.” Modern economics, he went on to say, had forever altered Corsican life. “The people who always lived here had everything—land, animals, family, homes. Everything, that is, except money. So they left. The young people won’t stick around. And even though there are more immigrants now, we go to far more funerals than baptisms.”
For our last meal in Corsica, we invited Magot and Martin to join us. They, in turn, offered us their larger, far better equipped kitchen. I panfried chops of grass-fed veal that we’d bought from Belgodère’s handsome red-haired butcher and smothered them with chanterelles and cèpes. As we ate, the wind picked up outside. We continued to talk—trying to hear each other over the encroaching mistral—of depopulation and forest fires, and of how different the region is now from what it had been at its agricultural peak. “In the 1940s,” said Martin, “you could drive all the way to L’Île-Rousse under a canopy of trees.”
A shutter began banging noisily. The next day, trees would be down. Our Parisian friends would have to be driven to Bastia, on the other side of the island, in order to find a plane that would brave takeoff. But for the time being, we were snug inside those old stone walls, enjoying a salad of Corsican-grown lettuce and backyard herbs. We set out cheese and the requisite jar of fig jam. “This food,” announced Magot, her voice full of wonder, “it’s so corse!” As the wind began to howl, we poured cups of steaming coffee and sat back to savor what we amateur Corsican cooks took to be the ultimate compliment.
The Details
Starting in Ajaccio, circle the island for what Corsica does best: simple, traditional fare and fresh seafood.
At U Stazzu (1 Rue Bonaparte; 04-95-51-10-80) in Ajaccio, charcutier Paul Marcaggi carries superb cheeses and charcuterie he produces from free-range pigs on his farm. Seafood house Le Floride (Port Charles-Ornano, Ajaccio; 04-95-22-67-48) revels in oysters. Trendy Le 20123 (2 Rue Roi de Rome; 04-95-21-50-05) evokes a Corsican village in its décor and in the updated classics from its kitchen. There’s a Riviera sensibility at Brasserie Diamant (3 Avenue Eugène-Macchini, Ajaccio; 04-95-21-04-56), where women in Chanel and gold, complete with lapdogs, gather for housemade pappardelle with plump langoustines. Les Fromagers Corses (Marché Central, Ajaccio; 04-95-20-47-25) offers artisanal cheeses.
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