page_title: Cuisine of Corsica
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Cuisine of Corsica / History
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Stoppia Nova et Ghjucatoghju, villages de Castagniccia, Corse, Corsica
context_page_description: The cuisine of Corsica is the traditional cuisine of the 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 Italian cuisine, and marginally with those of Nice and Provence.
context_section_description: 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 people 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 17th century, the Genoese administrator Baliano wrote that the Corsicans were living on barley bread, vegetables, and pure water.
  Other decrees were given on the same line, such as that issued in 1619, which ordered that 10 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.
  An old Corsican proverb from upper Niolo asserts: Pane di legnu e vinu di petra (English: Wooden bread and stoney wine), explaining well the central place occupied by the chestnut in Corsica's alimentation (and the frugality of Corsican mountaineers, obliged to drink water instead of wine). 
  During the Corsican independence before the French annexation, Pasquale Paoli tried to enrich the diet of his countrymen encouraging the cultivation of the potato, so his political opponents ridiculed him, calling him Il Generale delle patate.
  The French annexation in 1768 brought at first a change in this situation; in an effort to subjugate the rebels, the French army proceeded to cut down many chestnut forests, and this policy continued also during the first years of peace, since Paris favoured cereals over chestnut as staple food. After a while, though, the cutting down of chestnut trees ended, so that until the beginning of 20th century, chestnut in the form of pancakes, bread, or porridge remained the staple food of the larger part of Corsican population.
  Next to chestnuts, at the end of 700, the basis of Corsican diet was given from cereals (mainly wheat and rye), dried vegetables, and charcuterie.
  Anyway, there were also exceptions: from a testimony of 1775, during that year the owners of Cap Corse vineyards used the revenue from the sale of their wine to buy Italian pasta, goat and pork meat, and cod, and with those foodstuffs they ate all year round. The poor of the same region instead worked in the vineyards in the spring till the harvest, but in winter, they fed on wild herb soups. A few during summer went to reap the corn in the malaria plain of Aleria, but often after that they lost their health or life. Generally at the en
caption: Panorama of Castagniccia: The Genoese rule changed drastically the landscape of large parts of the island, introducing chestnut on large scale.
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