When I stepped out of the plane in Calvi, on the northwest coast of Corsica, the clear, sun-warmed air smelled of fennel. Saw-toothed mountains rose sharply to my left. Beside me, my Parisian friend Marie-Aimée took a deep breath. “We are not in Paris anymore,” she said.
Indeed. During the ten days we spent on the island, I kept a diary. After I returned home I noticed that the first five entries all bore the same date: October 15, 2003.
The lapse seemed somehow fitting: If ever there were a place where time stands still, it would be this rugged, sparse island rising from the Mediterranean midway between France and Italy. Here, medieval towns cling to cliffs and hilltops, French mistrals and African siroccos take turns thrashing the landscape, and every road but the main highway is a narrow, twisting lane more suitable for horse carts than for the daredevil drivers and scrawny free-range cows that populate them today. Anyone in need of refuge can disappear into the wild maquis and survive, protected by the fierce Corsican rule of hospitality, until the coast is clear.
Four of us—two from Paris, two from Southern California—had rented adjoining apartments with modestly equipped kitchens in Belgodère, a 17th-century enclave off the tourist track yet close to beaches and small cities. The kitchens were key, as our goal for this extended stay was to immerse ourselves in the flavors of the land. No sooner had we dropped our bags than the native graciousness kicked in. Our landlords—Martin, a self-described “arty iron worker,” and Magot, a Lacanian psychoanalyst—invited us to lunch at the outdoor café next to the town’s Baroque pink Église St. Thomas.
Our first Corsican meal introduced us to the island’s legendary big flavors: charcuterie plates with saucisson sec; lean, air-dried coppa; squarish, milder lonza—meat in some of its most condensed, seductive forms. As for the cheese plates, well, a friend in Paris had given me fair warning: “Eating Corsican cheese can be like ingesting a bomb.” He was right. Loud blasts of flavor came from a smooth, soft, orange-rinded chèvre, while a watery grayish brebis, I swear, could swiftly make you drunk. It was happily, then, that we discovered fig jam—the eternal companion to Corsican cheese—which, thanks to some curious chemical reaction, softens the cheeses’ bite and allows more nuanced flavors to bloom.
Thus initiated, we settled into our digs and took in the view from the terrace: ancient fortified hill towns, each as beautiful and tightly constructed as a poem, and beside them, like pale shadows, the white-marbled hamlets of the region’s dead. Below us, a broad, sloping lap of pastureland, oaks, and ancient olive trees stretched to the blue, blue sea.
Then we turned our attention to dinner. Our landlady had invited us to help ourselves from her garden, where plump, meaty tomatoes clustered on the vines and sage, basil, and parsley grew with wild abandon, their leaves broader and stronger-tasting than those I grow in California. On the citron tree hung thick-skinned fruit, heavy with juice.
A few hours later, our first home-cooked Corsican meal was on the table. The roasted free-range black-legged chicken stuffed with pricked citrons and rubbed with garlic and sea salt was not so tender, perhaps, but it was bold with flavor. We bruised basil leaves and scattered them on those gorgeous tomatoes, then poured a peppery green olive oil over all: a familiar salad, only with the volume cranked up. We finished with a subtle rosemary-encrusted brebis and a chèvre so ripe and pungent we’d had to banish it to the terrace until the time came for eating.
Situated strategically between Italy and France, Corsica was invaded in antiquity by everyone from the Greeks and the Carthaginians to the Romans. The Pisans seized control in the 11th century, the Genoese in the 13th, and France took over in 1768 (one year before the birth of Napoleon, the island’s most famous native son). Each of the invaders left their culinary mark: At cafés you can choose from panini, wood-fired pizza, haricots soissons (the enormous white beans I knew in Greece as gigantes), and veal with green olives—certainly adapted from the tagines of North Africa. It was the Genoese who insisted, some 300 years ago, that every landowner plant chestnut trees in order to guard against famine. Back then, the flour was used mostly for polentu, a grim, polenta-like mush rarely eaten for pleasure. Now, chestnut pastas, breads, and cakes are far more common.
Today it’s easy for even a casual tourist to find the culinary trademarks of Corsica. Nationalist sentiment and a persistent yen for independence have engendered not only a revival of the Corsican language and customs but a widespread allegiance to locally produced foods, which are always clearly labeled. We found, to our delight, that nonchain grocery stores often stocked a few jars of hand-labeled honey, a housewife’s jams, or some surplus bottles of a neighbor’s olive oil.
We also found ourselves making frequent supply runs into L’Île-Rousse, seven miles down the hill. Built in 1758 by beloved nationalist leader Pascal Paoli, the town was originally designed as an export center for the area’s famed olive oil. By 1900, however, the small farmers, oil producers, and beekeepers of the Balagne region, once the most fertile land on the island, were having trouble competing in the Continent’s increasingly industrialized economy. A century of emigration followed.
These days the lovely seaside town, with its picturesque rose-colored peninsula, flourishes as a tourist destination. But we’d arrived well after the summer rush. Many homes and businesses were shuttered, and the streets were filled with a rich, slanted autumnal light and a palpable feeling of tristesse. It felt as if we’d come after a marvelous, enormous parade. Leaves on the thick-trunked plane trees in the Place Paoli were fading to yellow, and the vast seas of tables outside the cafés were empty but for a few locals. On the other hand, we’d arrived just in time for game, wild mushrooms, and chestnuts, which littered the ground in their spiny orange casings. Arbouses (arbutus) hung ripe on the diminutive trees, the red, orange, and yellow fruits dangling like cheerful little marzipan candies.
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.
Chef Gisele Lovacchi’s Auberge Santa Barbara (Route de Propriano; 04-95-77-09-06), near Sartene, serves first-rate country-style Corsican cooking, with dishes like pigeon cooked with myrtle berries and polenta. In Bonifacio, in the south, dramatically perched on seaside cliffs, the cozy Stella d’Oro (7 Rue Doria; 04-95-73-03-63) offers excellent family-style cooking, centering on seafood.
The Grand Hôtel de Cala Rossa (Lecci de Porto-Vecchio; 011-33-4-95-71-61-51; from $884), an elegant Relais & Châteaux property, has an equally elegant restaurant. Superchic and luxurious Hôtel Casa delmar has a spectacular view of the bay of Porto-Vecchio and a Mediterranean-fusion restaurant (Route de Palombaggia, Porto-Vecchio; 011-33-4-95-72-34-34; from $785).
Philippe Orsoni Buisset, the founder of Miels et Merveilles, long lobbied for Corsican honey’s own AOC. Try his honey made from chestnuts or from the autumn maquis. Or visit his miellerie outside the beautiful hill town of Véro (20172 Véro; 04-95-52-86-00).
Just outside Aléria, on the eastern coast, feast on oysters from the Étang de Diane and the locally produced wine Réserve du Président at Aux Coquillages de Diana, a casual seaside barge restaurant (about a mile north of Aléria on Nationale 198; 04-95-57-04-55). Then head inland to Corte, where the best restaurant, U Museu (Rampe Ribanelle; 04-95-61-08-36), sits on a ledge just below the citadel where the Musée de la Corse is located. Sample the cannelloni stuffed with brocciu or the goat ribs. Overnight at nearby Hôtel Dominique Colonna (Vallée de la Restonica, southwest on D23; 011-33-4-95-45-25-65; from $115), a simple but pleasant hotel on the edge of the rushing rapids in the Gorges de la Restonica, and dine next door at Auberge de la Restonica (04-95-46-09-58), which offers great regional cooking such as soupe corse (hambone stock, sausage, white beans, and herbs).
A Casarella (6 Rue Ste.-Croix, Bastia; 04-95-32-02-32) is much beloved by the townspeople for its cooking based on ancient local recipes, including anchovies in herbs, garlic, and olive oil.
The drive north from Bastia along the coast is beautiful. Cross Cap Corse, the northernmost finger of the island, to tour the Jardins Traditionnels du Cap Corse (D180, Luri; 04-95-35-05-07), whose mission is to preserve this microregion’s vegetal diversity. Pick up some of their housemade conserves, like a white zucchini jam or watermelon preserves. Emerging on the western coast of the Cap, head for Corsica’s take on a New England seafood shack, U Scogliu (Marine de Canelle, Canari; 04-95-37-80-06), for grilled langouste (spiny lobster), sea bream baked in a crust of salt, and sea urchin in season.
La Balagne, the northwestern coast of the island, is the most popular destination for French vacationers. After lunch on the terrace at Chez Charles (N197, Lumio; 04-95-60-61-71), which serves contemporary versions of Corsican dishes, drive the back roads, including D236, D151, and D71, for stunning scenery.
Calvi pulls a stylish yachting crowd and has two of the best hotels on the island. Hôtel La Villa (Chemin Notre Dame de la Serra; 011-33-4-95-65-10-10; from $459) is swathed in Pierre Frey fabrics, and restaurant L’Alivu makes terrific veal chops cooked with maquis herbs. Go to Auberge-Relais La Signoria (Route de la Forêt de Bonifato; 011-33-4-95-65-93-00; from $338) for its lush gardens and private beach. But you can’t beat an alfresco dinner overlooking the harbor and the waterfront at Calellu (Quai Landry, Calvi; 04-95-65-22-18), a friendly fish place supplied by artisanal fisherman Jo Riccho. —Alexander Lobrano