Our trips rarely involve fine dining. That's really an element of travel that we think we can economize on. But although I'm sure that means we've missed many of the miracles of Corsican cuisine, we have very much enjoyed what we've eaten here over the last three weeks.

There's a nice little primer here on what to eat in Corsica. I'll be quoting from it lots.

Corsican cheese and charcuterie are great (and pretty much every supermarket carries a good range of local produce):


Chestnuts, you soon learn, are a Very Big Thing. One of the interesting decrees emanating from Genoese rule was the obligation for every landowner to plant four trees every year: A chestnut, an olive, a fig, and a mulberry. The chestnut heritage definitely continues. They even turn up in connection with sausages. The pigs feed on chestnuts; the sausage is often smoked over a fire of chestnut wood; and sometimes there's chestnut in the product, complementing the pork -- as here in this boar pate:


You can even find chestnut beer, which is really good:



Cheeses made from goat and sheep milk are particularly prominent on the dairy counter, and Brocciu (a fresh cheese made from whey) is perhaps the most famous. We thought it went really well with this Corsican cake made from hazelnut flour:


Brocciu is also used to make fiadone (on the left) and ambrucciata (on the right):


There's a lot of conflicting information on what exactly the difference is between these two. Suffice it to say they're both lemony and delicious (especially when eaten on the prom in Ile-Rousse):


Migliaccioli (little savoury pancakes) also feature cheese (sheep or goat, depending on who you read):


Corsican wine has been great, and we have tried a number of grapes we'd never previously heard of. Sciaccarellu, for example, is a red variety grown primarily in Corsica; niellucciu is a grape originating in Italy, but extensively cultivated in Corsica (it's commonly used to make rose wine, and we were interested to read that 70 per cent of Corsica's wine output is rose...); vermentino is planted round the western Mediterranean, including Corsica... And so it goes on...





I don't think Chanteclerc apples are exclusively Corsican, but they're definitely grown here, and we were big fans:


Canistrelli, those Corsican biscuits that you find in almost every retail outlet, made another appearance while we were in Bastia, kindly provided by our host:


This next one we didn't actually get to try, but the museum in Corte made us aware of it. In 1872, one Louis-Napoleon Mattei named his aperitif (containing cinchona tree bark, local wine, spices, and a lemony thing called cedrat) after his native Cap Corse (north of Bastia):



Having found out about it, we took a quick look at the very ornate outlet in Bastia:



Neither, of course, is Corsica lacking in the nice things you get in the rest of France. I'll round off with a couple of photos from Amadeus, which became our favourite cafe in Calvi:



Happy memories. Lots of yum.