Thoughts on Corfu

Looking across the sea to Albania, I am struck by how bare the hills are there.  Brown mountainside, dusted with occasional scrub, topped with heavy white clouds, in stark contrast to the dark green carpet of olive trees that covers all of the island of Corfu.

The olives here are not pruned or pollarded as in the rest of Greece, but left to grow into large ranging trees dense with silvery green leaf and tiny olives.  The fruits are not harvested as such but the ground is covered with black nets which are filled as the trees shed their purple-black olives.  The small dark olives of the island are full of flavour, their oil deep and peppery as a result of their extra time in the sun.

Every hillside is densley packed with ancient olives punctuated by pencil-thin tall pines but as you get closer to the villages, oranges, lemons, kumquats, figs and walnuts start to make their mark.

Each garden, each smallholding, has its citrus trees and its fig, a patch of courgettes, a few vines, a row of cabbages or alexanders, a tangle of tomato plants and of course a few hens scratching between.  The tomatoes are large, irregular, dense and full of sunshine flavour.  Pots of herbs sit along whitewashed walls - oregano and mint for drying and small bushes of rosemary for the lamb roasted in the oven with garlic and a pinch of cinnamon - a hangover from its days as a Roman outpost perhaps.

The food of Corfu is based on these things: the sheep - for lamb and for feta; peppers, aubergines and tomotoes - cooked in every sauce, with fish with rooster with beef or with lamb, or stuffed with onions rice and dried herbs and baked; local peppery village sausage and of course the olives providing nibbles, oil for frying, dressing and flavour.

As a cook, it is interesting to me that many of the herbs used are dried - the oregano is everywhere, the dried mint is found in the tzatziki giving a different flavour altogether from the fresh herb.

Even in the kiss-me-quick tourist traps like Sidari, almost any Taverna will treat you with respect if you order from the Greek section of the menu rather than the ubiquitous burgers-and-chips-and-pizza they advertise outside.  

Fish is surprisingly lacking (we sadly found no sign of a fishmonger or a fish section in the tourist-town supermarkets) though you can still find charcoal-grilled mackerel, sea bream or sardines or a local stew of white fish cooked with tomatoes and spices at most Tavernas.  Local supermarkets carry whole sides of saltfish but I never saw it on any menu.  The sea urchins I remember from a painful encounter on a Corfu beach some 16 years ago seem absent from both menu and beach today.

The wine, to be fair, isn't much to write home about.  My World Atlas of Wine simply says of Corfu that it "isn't an island for wine tourists."  The local red is pleasant enough - quite light bodied, dry and with a background taste of raisins.  It washes down the grilled lamb chops well enough.  The white seemed better for not actually being fridge cold, and thankfully not as distinctively flavoured as Retsina.

The village of Nymfes has grown round both sides of a deep valley fed by a pure natural spring.  It's where the kumquats grow for candied fruit, a sticky sweet licquor and - best of all - a tasty marmelade perfect on fresh bread for breakfast.  Forget the offers of ultimate-all-you-can-eat breakfasts featuring imported sausages and instead go for a bowl of thick and creamy yoghurt drizzled with mountain honey and that local bread and kumquat marmelade.

In Corfu town, we found a small restaurant serving only Greek food: baked feta, spinach pie, stuffed aubergines, mousaka and 'beans kastorias' - giant butter beans cooked for hours until deeply flavoured with yet more tomatoes, spices and oregano.  How refreshing not to have anything served with chips or to have lasagne or bolognese on the menu.

The light on a clear October day is so pure and bright, the sky and sea so perfectly blue that the contrast with the deep dark green of the olives is startling.  I think I'd rather be in Corfu than the desolate-looking Albania.  But then, that might be quite an adventure...

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