Postcard from Corsica – eat, drink, drive.

As an island, there’s a premium on anything that has to be imported to Corsica. This means that the food in the markets tends to be simple but, because it is all locally grown or made, it’s all good. I think the term normally applied is rustic, which means that 90% of the diet comes from something you kill, and around half of that is killed in the traditional Corsican manner, that is, poached.

Because of their antipathy towards France, the Corsican’s have taken France’s sole contribution to world cuisine, killing things cruelly, and turned it on its head. The Corsicans have invented ethical veal. That is, veal that is allowed to gambol wild and free rather than living in a crate. Okay, so we’re still talking about killing calfs, but by applying ethical dilemma test number 1: does it taste good? I find that I’m okay with that.

So the majority of the food is meat and the rest of locally grown vegetables. You can tell that they are locally grown because they have clumps of soil on them. This makes the tourists coo with delight at the authenticity of the carrots and makes the shop keepers coo with delight because the veg is sold by weight and the tourists are essentially buying dirt.

The local wine is very local. In the valley inland from St Florent in the north of the island sit lots of little vineyards. These sit on the valley floor and then climb the hills until the vines are clinging precariously. The vinyard stops where the tractor used to harvest the grapes topples over. This is no rustic heritage site with horny footed sons of toil treading the grapes. The crop is collected in a big trailer and tipped into a huge press thing and the end result is either bottled, or sent to the shop in the town.

These are interesting places, most of the vineyards have a presence in the town, usually a sort of hole in the wall place selling bottles of wine…and containing two stainless steel tanks about seven foot high and three foot wide. At the bottom of these lies curled a hose and they look for all the world like petrol pumps. What you do is take along your two litre plastic demijohn and get it filled with either red or rose. Because this costs you two euros for two litres, I suspect that what you actually get is rough red or rough rose and one hell of a head the next morning but what you save on the wine you can use to buy paracetamol, or a new liver from a Turkish boy on eBay.

The main industry on the island is tourism, goats, wild boar and wine. If they actually did get independence, the economy would implode after about fifteen seconds, but it would be a hell of a party.

The sea food was very good, very fresh but the stand out dish had to be the wild boar and anything that had butter in it.

The wild boar was endlessly adaptable, by which I mean you get a lot of sausages out of what used to be an angry wild pig. What you also get is a boar pate. This is a speciality of Corsica, meaning that no other nation would consider making the stuff and no other nationality would consider eating the stuff. It’s basically a high velocity pork delivery system with some artery clogging properties tagged on for good luck. If you haven’t got the time, energy or inclination to cook bacon or sausage, this is a way to satisfy all of your pork needs quickly and efficiently. I was thinking of importing it and marketing it as the midnight snack for drunks. ‘Too drunk to cook but fancy something porky? Try a spoonful of pork paste, throw your lungs up and be right as rain the next morning’.

The croissants don’t need buttering, they are at butter saturation point. So what you do is smear fig jam on them. You now have a breakfast that is more than 100% fat and will not need to eat for a week.