My first ever Substack Newsletter, a love letter to Corsica

The view towards the sea from the village of Sant Antonino

As I sit writing this on a quiet shady terrace in a tiny Corsican village, with only the companionable chatter of swallows to break the silence, I’m struck by the huge role Corsica has played in my lifelong love of cooking. I started my Instagram account while on holiday in Corsica (birthplace of Napoleon and only a short hop across a stretch of sea from Marseille)  eight years ago, when my children were very small, having been delighted, inspired and overjoyed by their reaction to the beautiful, fresh, simple Corsican food we ate that week. As their tiny sun kissed fingers hungrily sought cubes of creamy ewe’s milk cheese, garlicky green olives and fragrant chunks of melon, it occurred to me that it would be fun to document the colourful seasonal food we enjoyed as a family.

View from Pigna

Fast forward to 2024 and here I am back in Corsica, a place that exercises such a powerful draw that I cannot but return time and time again. I still feel that sense of pure child-like joy, on stepping off the plane and taking a big breath of the warm scented air that is so particular to this island.

I first came here as a very young child to visit my grandparents who spent six months a year in Paris and the other six in Corsica (to my mind the most perfect balance) and everything dazzled and amazed me. I was entranced by the flowers and plants that grow on the side of the dusty coast road that snakes around the island. Enormous dark green waxy oleanders with bright pink sweetly scented flowers, sprawling fig trees, more like Fig bushes with their branches reaching over walls and also growing downwards to touch the tarmac. Barbery fig Cacti, like plants from an alien planet, with their odd prickly fruit, wild Fennel, with tiny starry golden flowers and feathery leaves that left a pungent smell of licorice on your hands if you happened to brush them as you walked past. I was also puzzled by the sunlight which seemed so dazzling and clean compared to the sunshine I was accustomed to in suburban Paris. Mediterranean light somehow confers beautiful qualities to even the most ordinary building.

Me in Corsica in the 1980s

My grandparents lived in an apartment block, a little way up a steep hill overlooking the gulf of Ajaccio, and my grandfather said he could never tire of watching La Belle Bleue from the long balcony that ran across the front of the building. It was indeed a mesmerising sight - this expanse of sapphire blue reaching to the horizon and always teasing my imagination, as I wondered what lay beyond that line that separated the sea from the sky.

While my grandfather sat marvelling at the sparkling sea, my grandmother did what she loved best of all, cooking for her multigenerational brood. And tearing myself away from the mesmerising view, I loved to watch her prepare delectable meals in her tiny kitchen. There was always a green salad ( my grandparents’ generation maintained that this salad eaten towards the end of a meal, aided the digestion!) and leaves were washed carefully and then put in a spinner to remove any residual water (I was in charge of turning the handle on the salad spinner). My grandmother made her signature vinaigrette with red wine vinegar, salt, pepper and groundnut oil (huile d’arachide) to which she added finely sliced shallot.

At the height of the summer, it went without saying that Ratatouille would be on the menu - Corsican neighbours in the block of flats all had their ancestral homes up in the hills, and grew their own produce in sloping potagers where ancient gnarled olive trees somehow hugged giant boulders that seemed to have been there since the dawn of time. The friends and neighbours would return from a visit to the family in the « mountains » as they called the steep rocky hills that make up the interior of the island, with plastic bags bulging with seasonal fruit and vegetables: perfect smooth aubergines, knobbly red and green peppers, huge cœur de boeuf tomatoes, glorious courgettes and herbs such as parsley and thyme but also onions still covered in dusty Corsican soil. Knowing how much my grandma loved to cook, these kind neighbours would leave gifts of produce outside her door and we would find these colourful delights when we returned from an afternoon spent at Marinella beach. My grandma very efficiently peeled, sliced chopped all the sun kissed vegetables and cooked them down slowly in a huge pan with lots of olive oil and Corsican herbs. My grandfather’s contribution to the meal was a peach fruit salad which he made with very ripe peaches that he picked up by the crate load for next to nothing in the food market in Ajaccio. Using his trusty Opinel knife which he carried with him at all times, sitting stolidly at the kitchen table, he would peel the fruit at breakneck speed, throw it into a large salad bowl and and then sprinkle the quarters with lots of white sugar before placing the bowl in the fridge for a few hours until all the sugar had dissolved creating an irresistible peachy syrup that coated the fruit.

Many decades on, and still Corsica remains the dream landscape of my childhood. I have to pinch myself as I look round because it has changed so little. It’s a breathtakingly beautiful environment that has been passionately preserved and protected. So much of the produce you will find here is organic and there is a network of farms and food producers that offer a farm to table experience - just near where we are staying in Santa Reparata, there is a quiet road lined with eucalyptus trees, that takes you down through the lush green valley and up the majestic hills with regular stops to visit organic fruit orchards, artisan cheese makers, olive oil producers and bee keepers.

One of our favourite places to visit is a Corsican botanical garden called le Parc de Saleccia, where everything is grown organically and the cafe serves the most glorious local seasonal food. As our week here is drawing to a close, I’m making the most of all the lovely vegetables I’ve picked up on our various outings and today I’m preparing a salad of courgette, olive, Parma ham and local cheese with olive oil and Corsican herbs. We will eat it with a free range rotisserie chicken we bought this morning in L’Ile Rousse, lots of sliced local lemon, some juicy green figs and tomatoes chopped up with onion and sea salt. And there will be a bottle of perfectly chilled, very pale pink Corsican Rosé on the table.

Here is the recipe for the Corsican Courgette Salad:

Ingredients

2 small green courgettes

2 small yellow courgettes

Bunch fresh basil

Ewe’s milk cheese such as feta (I used Corsican cheese here)

4 slices of cured ham such as Parma, or San Daniele

Handful of green olives

Pinch Provençal or Corsican herbs

Olive oil

Using a Y shaped vegetable peeler, cut the courgettes into ribbons, place them on kitchen towel and season well with salt and black pepper.

Heat 1 tbs oil in a large frying pan and fry the courgette ribbons on a high heat for 4 to 5 minutes, moving them around all the time with tongs or a wooden spoon. Set aside to cool on a plate.

Once cooled down, place the ribbons on a serving plate, sprinkle with the dried herbs, add the cured ham, the olives, the basil leaves and finally the crumbled cheese. Drizzle generously with olive oil before serving with chunks of sourdough bread.