Cuisine of Corsica

The cuisine of Corsica is the traditional cuisine of the French island of Corsica. It is mainly based on the products of the island, and due to historical and geographical reasons has much in common with the Italian cuisine, and marginally with those of Nice and of Provence.

The geographic conformation of Corsica, with its eastern coast (the one nearest to the continent) low, malaria-ridden and impossible to defend, forced the population to settle in the mountains of the interior. The agricultural products exported during Antiquity reflect this situation: these were sheep, plus honey, wax and tar, produced by the widespread forests. Moreover, the island was famous for its cheap wines, exported to Rome. The concentration of settlement in the interior, typical also of the nearby Sardinia, lasted until the beginning of the 20th century: in 1911, 73,000 inhabitants lived in the zone comprised between 700 and 1,000 m above sea level. In the Middle Ages, and more precisely during the 12th century, when Pisa was Corsica's hegemonic power, the large immigration from nearby Tuscany brought to the island, together with the Tuscan language, customs and dishes typical of that Italian region. Later, when it was the turn of Genoa to dominate the island, a major shift in people's eating habits took place: the Genoese governor, with a decree signed on 28 August 1548, ordered that each landowner and tenant had to plant at least a chestnut, a mulberry, an olive and a fig tree each year, under the fine of three lire for each tree not planted. The reason for this decree was to give means of subsistence to island populations: still at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Genoese administrator Baliano wrote that the Corsicans were living on barley bread, vegetables and pure water. Other decrees on the same line, such as that issued in 1619, which ordered that ten chestnut trees had to be planted every year by each landowner and tenant, with time changed radically the landscape of whole regions of the island, with the almost total substitution of cereals with chestnuts: one region, the Castagniccia, south of Bastia, got its name from its chestnut (castagnu) forests. In the 18th century the chestnut had almost completely replaced cereals. Above all chestnut plantations radically changed the diet of the islanders, preserving them from the recurrent famines. It was so that the historian of Corsica Jakob Von Wittelieb could write that in the 1730s travelers in the island brought with them a flask filled with wine and a pocket containing a chestnut bread or some roasted chestnuts.

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Wikipedia