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Corsica is, above all, wild—Balzac's ''back of beyond''; a seabound granite precipice where vendettas and feuds, not lawsuits, are the rule; an island where free-range animals live side by side with free-range people—who would rather hunt and gather than farm and fish. (Why grow wheat when chestnuts fall from trees?) Although Corsica has been under French control since 1768, its fiercely independent inhabitants have always kept Paris at arm's length. Never fully integrated into mainland life—whether Pisan, Genoese, or French—Corsica is where your spouse goes when you've really blown it: ''Je vais en Corse!'' (''I'm going to Corsica!'') It's all France's wilderness refuge.

 

From the village of Murato, high in the hills above the Corsican port city of Bastia, I could just make out the French mainland to the northwest, hovering cloudlike in the distance. ''You're in luck,'' said Henri Thiers, an owner of the nearby Ferme Campo di Monte. ''You can see the Continent from here only two or three days a year.'' Gale-force winds had made for a memorable overnight ferry-crossing from Genoa, but my discomfort was a small price to pay for a morning so clear that Provence seemed little more than a few valleys away. As I turned slowly to the east, the Mediterranean and France faded from view, replaced by the Tyrrhenian Sea, the island of Elba, and the coast of Italy.
  

Blanketing the hillside below us was the famed maquis corse, or Corsican scrub—a dense, fragrant underbrush of oak, juniper, thorn, heather, and wild herbs and flowers that covers much of the island. Its bittersweet lemon-pepper aroma, described as ''akin to incense'' by English anthropologist Dorothy Carrington in her award-winning Granite Island (Longmans, 1971), has earned Corsica the sobriquet The Perfumed Isle. Taking a deep breath of the scrub, I recalled that Napoleon Bonaparte, the island's most famous native son, was apparently so enamored of this musky smell that he dreamed of it during his final days on Elba.
  

Thick almost to the point of being impenetrable, the maquis—which can reach as high as 20 feet—was for centuries a refuge for Corsican outlaws. Today the most dangerous inhabitants you're likely to find are wild boar. ''These towering mountains,'' Thiers continued, motioning around us, ''intercept clouds and produce the abundant rain-fall that makes the maquis so rich and the soil so fertile.'' 
  

High mountains, abundant rainfall, dense vegetation: Nearly all of the secrets of the island's food had just been revealed to me. The Corsican specialties that I had been dreaming of since my last visit—onctueux stews and soups, wonderful smoked and roasted meats, powerful cheeses—get their unmistakable character from the maquis. The scrub also provides ideal grazing for game as well as for free-range pigs, cows, sheep, and goats—all of which forage at their leisure, resulting in especially aromatic and flavorful meats and milks. And Corsica's industrious cooks utilize this bounty to the fullest.

 

Murato is justly famous for its extraordinary 12th-century polychrome church, San-Michele de Murato, but there is another, almost equally compelling reason to visit the town: the 15-year-old restaurant Ferme Campo di Monte. Corsicans seldom agree about anything, but they all seem to admire the Campo di Monte and its owners, Thiers and Pauline and Josiane Juillard. 
  

When I arrived at the restaurant, the sisters were busy in the kitchen preparing the night's dinner: On the stove were goat stew, storzapreti—gratinéed cheese dumplings with mint and egg—and soupe corse. The Juillards' version of this hearty mountain soup, also called soupe montagne or soupe paysanne, includes a meaty ham bone—schincu in Corsican, an archaic mix of Latin and Italian—olive oil, garlic, potatoes, noodles, and a garden's worth of vegetables and herbs. ''We took it off the menu once,'' Pauline confided, ''but then we had an uprising. Our regular patrons protested. It's certainly the most universal Corsican dish.'' One spoonful was enough to make me understand why.
  

Also in the works was a huge fiadone, a cheesecake made with Corsica's ricottalike brocciu (pronounced ''brooch'', with a delay on the ch; see box below). I started to bombard the Juillards with questions about Corsica's numerous cheeses, but they were focused on the task at hand and politely sent me down the road to the small village of Vallecalle to see their brocciu supplier, Fromagerie Casanova. A brisk walk later, I arrived at a simple, sterile-looking facility. Until a few years ago, cheesemakers often worked out of their shepherd's bergerie, usually a small stone or wooden hut. New French laws now prohibit this. In a white-tiled room, fromagerie owner Pierre-Philippe Casanova and shepherd Paul Pruneta were stirring (with obvious glee) the pale, creamy contents of a metal pot set over a low flame. When I asked Casanova, a rugged, self-assured mountain dweller, about the cheese he was making, he quickly replied: ''It's not cheese, it's brocciu!'' which he went on to describe as ''light, fresh, yet...anything but bland, like a ricotta with the taste of the maquis''. Brocciu plays a part in many Corsican dishes, including storzapreti, omelettes, and beignets, and is commonly eaten at breakfast seasoned with salt and pepper or topped with jam.

This article was first published in Saveur in Issue #34