Episode 1 Rick Stein's Mediterranean Escapes

After 59 days travelling through leafy green tunnels

on the canals of southwest France,

I finally reached what I think is a magical sea.

A place which has long been considered the centre of our western civilisation.

At the end of the last series, we finished up in Marseille,

but one of the last shots was going out to sea,

out of the mouth of the Rhone

on the barge, on the Anjodi.

I was thinking, "I want to carry on now.

"I want to go somewhere." And the obvious choice was to go to Corsica.

I thought about doing a trip round the Med in a sailing boat, but it would have been like the old song,

"I joined the Navy to see the world, but what did I see? I saw the sea."

So it was the trusty Land Rover and ferries.

In the '70s, before package tours and air travel, I used to take my old Land Rover across Europe

to places like Marseille or Genoa and Piraeus and take a ferry somewhere.

It was hard work. Most of the time we had no money and slept on wooden benches.

It was so interesting. It was tough, but there was a real pay-off.

You got to know people on the boats, you got a flavour of the food,

and you arrived somewhere, almost part of the atmosphere, and you don't get that on aeroplanes.

I just think that if you really like food, this is the best way to travel,

but in my journey round the Med, I'll visit well-known places where thousands of British people go,

and where, surprisingly, food is not the main thing on their minds.

-I'm not here for the cuisine.

-Chips and gravy.

-I've got my brown sauce.

There's nothing wrong with brown sauce, but there's fabulous dishes in the back streets, in villages

and next to the hundreds of markets, that a lot of holidaymakers miss altogether.

I'm going pretty far afield from west to east, with food at the forefront of my mind.

Most of what I'll experience will be a first for me,

although some dishes will be old favourites that I've loved since I came to the Med as a teenager.

The Mediterranean holds something dear to us all - this clear, sparkling sea,

which in some places isn't as clear and sparkling as it should be!

They say we kill the things we love and how true is that!

But this is my first port of call,

the island the French call Ile de Beaute, "the beautiful island".

Well, that's it, I rest my case -

ferry travel, look at that, over air travel.

I can't wait to get ashore. It's like an oil painting and I can already smell the maquis.

Napoleon, when he was imprisoned on Elba, was always made very sad

when the wind came from the west and he could smell the maquis from his homeland.

This looks as if I'm arriving in Italy, but this was owned and run for 500 years by the Genoans,

then they sold it to France 250 years ago, so there's a lot of Italian influence.

Even the northern capital Bastia comes from the Italian meaning "stronghold" or "citadel".

Napoleon Bonaparte might very well be Corsica's favourite son.

Not everyone will agree with that,

but judging by the freshness of the flowers under his statue, the local council like him very much indeed.

I don't think a great deal has changed since he popped his clogs.

He could still find his way around here. They say the Corsicans can be a little stern and suspicious

and they think very much of themselves as Corsicans first and French firmly second.

This is the little touchstones in a market that I'm always looking for, the products from the area.

-I suspect that's, um...

-C'est oeuf du poisson.

-Oui.

-Les oeufs du poisson. C'est du caviar.

-Comme le caviar?

-Caviar, oui.

That's grey mullet roe that's salted. It's a real speciality of this part of the Mediterranean.

-And these are anchovies.

-Les anchois a la bastiaise.

-Oui.

Il y a de l'ail, un melange d'huile, le persil - a la maman!

She says these are anchovies, but they're done to her mother's recipe

with oil, garlic and parsley.

-Combien pour ca?

-Huit.

-Huit.

Anchovies, bread, some tomatoes, a glass of wine - perfection.

I'd like to try some ham if I could.

-Can I taste some?

-Yeah, sure.

So, how come you speak English so well?

I've been living in London for a few years when I was a student.

I was working in a Greek restaurant.

-Do you imagine? A French girl in England working in a Greek restaurant.

-Interesting.

Then I came back to work here.

-It's exquisite ham. Could I buy a couple of slices?

-Sure.

What would you recommend in Corsican food to somebody that doesn't know it?

The best you find in charcuterie and cheese, of course.

-Le brebis.

-Goat. Goat cheese.

And sheep cheese. It's typical to Corsica.

-Is that all right like this?

-That's perfect. Merci.

All I need is some bread now.

Sorry, we don't make bread.

I didn't realise that the creator of nonsense verse, Edward Lear,

put Corsica on the British tourist map some 150 years ago.

This is a very important spot because it's almost identical to an illustration Edward Lear did

of Bastia in his book, Journal Of A Landscape Painter.

It's about a trip he made to Corsica in the 1860s.

Lear opened up the interior of Corsica to tourism.

I like to think that The Owl And The Pussycat, which he wrote about the same time, was about Corsica.

It goes, "They sailed away for a year and a day in a beautiful pea-green boat."

It goes on, "There in a wood a piggy-wig stood with a ring at the end of his nose."

That would refer to the excellent charcuterie that Lear would have found everywhere he travelled.

Lear was an endearingly shy and whimsical man and embarrassed about his bouts of epilepsy,

so he was astonished by the warmth of his reception everywhere he went -

until he discovered that his Albanian servant was referring to him

as the British Finance Minister.

If I'd come by sailing boat, I wouldn't even be halfway here.

Having the Land Rover is really helpful because Corsica is the most mountainous, rugged, wooded island

in the whole of the Mediterranean.

When I saw that silky pink light on the barge, I was thinking of palm trees and vineyards.

This is like driving through the Highlands of Scotland, but here there are goats munching the maquis.

Once you've tasted a leg of roast kid, it's a food memory locked into that special place in your mind.

At home, goat or kid is nigh-on impossible to find.

Farmers' markets would do well to consider selling it.

Terrible turning circle on these things!

'Anyway, I'm meeting Vincent Tabarani.'

-Bonjour.

-Bonjour.

'He's the Delia Smith of Corsica and he runs a school which the local TV televise Saturday mornings.

'Because the population here are so proud of anything to do with Corsica, it's very popular.

'He's cooking a lunch made of roast kid, lamb, figs and roasted tomatoes.'

I hate to say this as a writer of cookery books, but there is no substitute for being here,

just to see this dish being prepared.

If I was going through a recipe book for a confit of milk-fed lamb, I might have flicked past it

because it would have been boring,

but to see Vincent's enthusiasm for the raw materials and to be in this cookery school,

it's a great advertisement for cookery schools.

They're all really getting stuck in and it's clear what's going on.

To just watch the way he's cooking these little gigots of kid and the way that he wrapped them

in caul fat, in crepinette, just to keep them nice and moist

and the way it was roasted very delicately

and a nice gravy made with the bones and bits and bobs with wine.

It's good fun being with him and picking up on what he's saying. Also, how interested they are.

And I love these Coco Rose. Oh, yes.

Just cooked with a bit of onion and romarin - perfect.

I mean, all the ingredients go together so well.

Alors, la typicite de la cuisine corse, c'est une cuisine du terroir.

C'est la montagne.

'What Vincent said is it's extremely pastoral, the cooking of Corsica,

'and it's based on what shepherds would have cooked - legs of kid or milk-fed lamb,

'and these simple beans are a very obvious addition.

'And they came from Africa, the pulses, years and years ago, bought in to the local cuisine,

'but it's pastoral cooking and that's what I find really exciting.'

I just really like very simple, basic food like this,

which relies on the specific taste of local ingredients. That's what it's all about.

Roasted kid and knuckles of lamb with wine cooked with wild herbs is a really good idea for lunch.

The meat doesn't need anything added to it

as it's full of flavour from what the animals eat on the mountainside.

And then the roasted tomatoes and figs. I've never had them cooked like this before.

Vincent wanted me to taste a little bit of the isle of Corsica.

Et voila!

When I first came to Corsica, I was looking for seafood and I was a little bit disappointed.

But I've learnt that Corsicans are really involved in food from the land, from the mountains.

I just have to say this is perfect food for me.

I like simple cooking that reflects the region which it comes from.

There is as much subtlety in this food, in fact more than any Michelin-starred restaurants.

This food speaks of the country. Fantastic.

-Merci.

-Merci beaucoup a vous.

-En Corse on dit "salute".

-Salute!

'This is the centre of Bastia and this is why it's called Bastia -

'a bastion - and whenever the town was threatened, this is where the townspeople came for protection.

'I met a party of schoolchildren on a history tour

'and asked them what their favourite Corsican dishes were.'

Le meilleur plat de Corse, c'est un poulet et les figatelli.

-Celine?

-La coppa.

-Figatelli.

-Maxime?

-Les frappes.

-Les frappes. Francois?

-Figatelli.

-Et Remy?

-Les canistrelli.

-C'est bon.

Fantastic. I just wonder if you asked the same question of a group of British children,

very difficult thing to ask, I'm not rubbing people's noses in it,

but these kids know their dishes so well and it's what I'd suspect they would choose, not burgers and chips.

-Goodbye.

-Bye-bye.

Most of the children said they really liked figatelli, Corsican sausages,

and here in Murato, famous for its charcuterie, the best are made from the Corsican black pig.

The flesh is gamier and more suited to these strong flavoured sausages.

Pascal Fleury farms his own because he says farming your own pigs

is the start for the business of making charcuterie to be proud of.

And this is it - the famous figatelli.

It's made with bloody offal - notably, the heart, the liver,

the kidneys, the cheek and all those bits that don't tend to turn up on the butcher's slab,

but what makes them special is they add salt, pepper, red wine

and then most importantly, they smoke them over chestnut wood

and you end up with, I think, the best-tasting product on the island myself, too.

L'important, c'est de faire un produit...

'He says that the importance of making figatelli is feeding a passion, also improving the product

'and making something that wins prizes on the island.

'Here, charcuterie is as important as local politics.'

Pascal says he is very happy to be making charcuterie products

because Corsican charcuterie is what Corsica is all about.

He said he started life as a professional footballer for Bastia,

but he wasn't strong enough to make the first team.

He remembered his aunt was a famous producer of charcuterie

and he just learnt what she was doing.

Now he is possibly the best maker of charcuterie on the island.

That evening, I went to the village of Sorio di Tenda to a local festival

where the figatelli were grilled over a wood fire.

They'd been cooked like this for centuries,

but they didn't have pride of place.

That went to this - pulenda, chestnut flour heated up in water and stirred and stirred

until it takes on the consistency of, well, fudge, I suppose.

I've just been watching him. It's quite hard work. He has to do this for about half an hour.

He's stirring it, but he's also twizzling the, um, "pulendai..."?

-Pulenda. Pulendaio.

-That's the actual baton that he's using.

I suppose it's like poor people's food

in the same way as the very similar sounding polenta is the poor people's food to the Italians,

but it's now more of a social thing.

'So when it's stirred enough, it's celebrated - rather like the piping in of the haggis.

'But to me... Well, I wasn't in a tremendous rush to try it.

'I was fascinated to see that once it had cooled down,

'it was cut by string tied to this man's finger.

'A Corsican moves in mysterious ways, I feel.'

THEY SING A CORSICAN FOLK SONG

Hmm. Interesting.

I don't know whether I like it so much on its own. It does taste very chestnutty.

But with a figatellu - that's a single sausage - it goes very well.

The smoky taste and the chestnut taste just reminds you of Corsican forests.

Well, I won't be cooking that back in Padstow, but I do feel really strongly about this -

my little interpretation of Corsica.

Of all the islands in the Mediterranean, Corsica is about forests and mountains

and in winter, it gets really cold. So this dish really reflects it.

We've got wild boar, wild mushrooms, we've got figatellu, of course.

You can't get it in the UK, so I've had to use chorizo instead.

The other thing about this dish is chestnuts.

I'll finish off with chestnuts thrown in at the end.

I suppose they would be the food symbol of the island of Corsica.

This is my dish, but I wouldn't mind guessing that there are similar dishes all over Corsica.

It's using all those very distinctive flavours.

I came up with the idea at that village

when they were celebrating all those foods of the area.

For me as a cook, it's important to use the local ingredients

and come up with a dish.

It sets a picture of the dish and the country in my mind.

Having marinated it all in red wine for 24 hours,

I drain it off and fry the wild boar to brown the meat.

I'm putting the pork in two batches, otherwise it will boil in its own juice, rather than caramelise.

Now, if I was still in Bastia, I'd be putting in figatelli,

but as I couldn't find it, I'm using chorizo.

Corsicans watching this will be most indignant, I'm sure.

Now, a spoonful or two of tomato puree and flour to thicken the stew and that will absorb some fat.

This is a new-look me - no measured amounts of flour,

learnt from mothers and grandmothers all over the Mediterranean. Just bung it all in!

Next, vermouth - it's got a really herby flavour - and the residue of the red wine marinade.

It's so important to really sear meat when you're making a stew.

The Corsicans stew everything.

Somebody rather jokingly said, "They'd stew their grandmother if you gave them half a chance."

That was the jokey implication.

But it's really lovely and velvety now.

And the colour is so good when you really caramelise the meat.

I put in some dried porcini mushrooms for a woodland flavour and home-made beef stock.

I season this well. It's a rich dish - comforting autumnal food, I'd say,

perfect for when the wind is whistling through the maquis in the back end of October.

I cover now and gently simmer for an hour to an hour and a half,

then add some fresh mushrooms and chanterelles, then put in the essence of Corsica - chestnuts.

These come from a tin and I'm pleased they did, too,

as it would take longer to peel them than cook this entire dish!

I add chopped parsley, cook for ten minutes and serve with a good chunky pasta like penne.

After all, Corsica has many strong links with Italy.

A deep local red like Patrimonio would be a very welcome addition.

Bon appetit!

BRASS BAND MUSIC

France, as we all know, is famous for its food festivals.

Every village, it seems, has one culinary item they celebrate each year.

This is Venaco, right in the middle of the island, and today is cheese day,

a celebration of Corsican cheeses and all things these people hold dear to their hearts,

like beignets, deep-fried doughnuts. The Corsicans are crazy for them.

Balzac, the French writer and serious gourmand, thought that Corsica was the back of beyond,

but today really does reflect part of their character,

which is fiercely independent and totally tied to the landscape.

These people aren't so much farmers, more like hunter-gatherers

where free-range animals live alongside free-range people.

The President of the Cheesemakers is Jean Sansonetti.

In the rest of France, are Corsican cheeses high in...?

Everybody says that France is a cheese country.

There are 200 cheeses.

But Corsica was a country where the shepherds were the most important people

of their village because they had the capability to give everybody something to eat.

I was just told a couple of days ago by a shepherd here

that 20 years ago, being a shepherd was regarded as the lowest of the low.

They had been the most important person in the village, but had slipped in estimation.

Since then, because of the growth of the Slow Food Movement and interest in food generally,

the idea of being an artisan craftsman making goat's or sheep's milk cheese in Corsica

has caught on with the trendy set in Paris and people are selling their "appartements" in Paris

and coming here, buying a smallholding and making cheese!

'The little town of Lama is famous for its brebis cheese.

'That's a generic term for ewe's milk cheese, rather like "chevre" means "made from goat's milk".

'It's got a sweet and nutty flavour. I've never seen it in a British supermarket.

'Mind you, I've never seen a good Cheddar in a French supermarket!

'I've come to meet a shepherd, not a Johnny-come-lately from Paris,

'he was born here and kept on the farming tradition -

'Jean-Francois Sammarcelli.

'He was too busy to go to the cheese festival, as he milks his sheep twice a day

'and has no-one, apart from his wife Anne, to help him make a few dozen cheeses every morning.'

-Normalement?

-La machine. C'est plus propre. C'est moins fatiguant.

What Jean-Francois was saying and I was just, while he was talking to me,

noticing how quick they're milking and how little amount of milk comes from each sheep.

It's really hard-won sheep's milk.

Not like cows. I was brought up on a farm and there was lots of milk in a cow.

I was just asking him about the importance of the shepherds in Corsica.

He said shepherds really are the landscape of Corsica.

He's carrying on the same tradition as his grandfather and his father.

It's a bit easier with modern milking equipment, but otherwise it's essentially the same.

I feel privileged to be watching this. He's a true artisan. I can't wait to taste his brebis cheese.

Jean-Francois was saying earlier on about the flavour of the milk,

how it comes from the maquis, the wild herbs and bushes

that the sheep graze on up here in the hills.

It changes, depending on where you are on the mountain.

Here we've got things like cistus, heather, oak, wild pear over there and myrtle.

Further down the mountain, we have various wild mints, rosemary, thyme

and that's what makes the ewe's milk so special and the flavour of that brebis cheese so unique.

Anne makes the cheese. She comes from a neighbouring village and has brought her own expertise to Lama.

After a month, the cheese tastes mild and delicate,

but it's fully mature at four months when it's tangy and nutty.

And now the bit I've been waiting for as I had to get up before breakfast to attend the milking.

This is about two months old.

It's everything I expected - utterly delicious, very tangy.

It's got a unique flavour. I can almost taste the maquis in there.

This is perfect artisan produce.

To my mind, Corsican cheeses are some of the best in France.

Well, I must say that was a fantastic day with Jean-Francois and Anne.

But one thing he was saying, which made me rather depressed,

was a lot of people are buying milk from the mainland, bringing it over on the ferry

and making cheese over here and calling it Corsican cheese.

It reminds me, a few years ago, I was talking to a large supermarket about Cornish dairy ice cream.

They had done a survey of about 20 ice creams and only one had Cornish dairy produce in it.

It's so tacky! Anyway, long live Jean-Francois and Anne and their beautiful cheese.

I suppose my perception of Corsica was of a hot Mediterranean island -

lovely sandy beaches, seafood and that sort of thing.

So it came as a surprise to discover that seafood is quite rare.

It's quite hard to find good seafood.

It's all about mountain cookery. The really good food here is the simple stuff high in the hills.

The reason is summed up by this place - the Citadel.

This is where the locals in Bastia would come to for refuge

when the sails were on the horizon and the Barbary pirates were coming to town,

but worse still was malaria.

There were swamps all the way round, so people lived inland.

And the malaria was only cleared up in the Second World War by the Americans,

so really it's a food about saucissons, hams and chestnut flour - all mountain stuff.

But I had to find some fish. A week cannot go by without fish or shellfish.

One of the local people helping us to make this programme

suggested I come to the fishing village of Erbalunga.

It's had its fair share of rape and pillage, judging by the battlements,

but I suspect its fishing days are long over and it's a backdrop for wealthy tourists to eat seafood.

This fish is a dentex, named because of its sharp teeth, which it uses to crunch up shellfish,

which goes a long way to give it its flavour.

It's one of the best fish in the Mediterranean. It's got a lovely, firm, sweet flesh.

This would have been cooked for 15 to 20 minutes with lemon and olive oil and cost an arm and a leg.

No wonder the Corsicans don't eat much seafood!

-Monsieur...

-Merci.

-Je vous en prie. Bon appetit.

-Merci.

Beautiful flavour.

The waiter just said it's like sea bass, only better.

There's a similar fish in Australia called the silver trevally, which is also very good. Absolutely superb.

You can't get dentex back in the UK, but you can get gilthead bream,

another great Mediterranean fish and, I think, just as good.

Still on the subject of fishing,

I really wanted to go out on a boat to see how difficult it's become

to get a living out of the Mediterranean.

I always love this moment.

When the net's on the way in, it's just the sense of anticipation.

What's great for me is I've never been on a fishing boat in the Mediterranean,

so I'm looking forward to different types of fish to things like sole, turbot, monk that we get,

but they've caught one monkfish and are hoping to catch some more.

They're also hoping to catch some langoustes - Mediterranean lobster - so we will see.

This is like a millpond. It's not like the fishing back home, where you can hardly stand.

And this is a great fish.

It's from the tuna family. It's a bonito. They're really good grilled and served with a mustard sauce.

Like mackerel, they're best eaten sparkling fresh

and the fishermen said even a thunderstorm can change their flavour.

Ah, now, that's better. That's a little langouste.

But they also told me that in the '60s and '70s, these langoustes were really plentiful

and could be caught 40 or 50 yards from the shore. Not any more.

-La peche est bonne?

-Non, pas terrible. Pas terrible.

C'est... Il y a beaucoup de plancton.

Donc le filet peche mal.

He's just saying that there's a lot of plankton that settle in...

-La boue.

-Je comprends, oui.

A lot of plankton... I've seen it in the net.

It settles on the net until the fish... It makes the net look opaque, so they can see it

and they swim away from it, so it's not good fishing.

It just makes me laugh because whenever you talk to a fisherman,

there's always some reason why they're not catching fish. The world over.

It's such a beautiful still life, a "nature morte", as the French say, of Mediterranean fish,

so different to our own.

They were fishing for a couple of hours. It's not a bad catch. A lot of this fish fetches good money.

This is Ajaccio, the capital of Corsica,

famous as being the birthplace of Napoleon.

There's a continual flow of tourists here,

who make a beeline for the house where he grew up.

His family were bourgeois, originating from Italian nobility.

His father, a lawyer, represented Corsica at court in Paris.

Napoleon coined the adage, "An army marches on its stomach,"

and he put food in tins on a large scale because it was a convenient way to feed his troops on campaigns.

This was his garden where he'd play with his tin soldiers, no doubt,

and maybe consider conquering half of Europe with a bit of North Africa thrown in, as you do.

I mentioned Edward Lear earlier.

When he first sailed to Ajaccio, he thought he could see lots of pretty beach huts lining the shore,

only later to find out they were family tombs,

one of which now bears the name of Corsica's other favourite son, opera singer Tino Rossi.

Jean Verreau is a chef and restaurateur whose dream would have been to serve the Emperor

and the opera singer his signature dish - langouste with pasta.

Before he became a cook, he ran a discotheque, just as I did.

His restaurants are always full, with customers coming back time and time again

for langoustes, which we call spiny lobsters, and pasta served with a really rich sauce.

It's like a strong fish soup with loads of tomatoes, chilli and cinnamon and flamed with brandy.

The spiny lobsters are halved and left to cook in this sauce for about 15 minutes

and it's just one man cooking it all.

I've got nine cooks at any given time in my restaurant.

Food for thought, I think! Jean Verreau made the sauce before I arrived

and was a bit cagey about giving the recipes away, but it's his only dish and who can blame him?

The closeness to Italy in Corsica's history is reflected in this dish

with its intense flavour of garlic and tomatoes,

except that I can't help but feel the Italians might just have been a bit more subtle than this.

The sauce wins the day here and not the lobster

which I feel is the wrong way round, but when in Rome, hey, and I loved it.

I met up with Rolli Lucarotti who suggested we filmed here.

She wrote the first Corsican cookery book in English.

This is not just for the two of us!

It's such a good idea just having one special dish

and just cooking that and the world beats a path to your door.

I think it's brilliant.

But I think the cooking is very gutsy.

I don't know if you've noticed, this is quite spicy.

-Yeah.

-There's nothing insipid about Corsican food.

It's very Mediterranean, it's very colourful.

The taste is very colourful, which is what I love about it.

When I came here first, it was difficult to find Corsican food in restaurants.

They were almost ashamed of it. They sold pizzas and steaks and chips.

The only Corsican food was in the family. It was passed down from mother to daughter

or from father to daughter, because the men cook here as well.

They're very passionate cooks, which is interesting.

-So they don't regard it as being...

-Absolutely not. In Corsica, the men do love cooking as well.

I've heard impassioned arguments in bars from men saying, "I never put anchovy in my sauce,"

the other one saying, "Yes, I do." Everybody's interested in food here.

There was one man cooking and one waitress serving for at least 60 people that night.

Now, that is real profit.

And so to Bonifacio, my departure point from Corsica to Sardinia,

on a really blustery day when I hope the ferry will be cancelled

and I can have my last lingering shot at this robust Corsican food,

but it wasn't to be. These ferrymen are made of tough stuff.

I'm fairly certain that in The Odyssey, this is the spot

where the giants, Laestrygonians, were raining boulders down on Odysseus and his crew.

In this rough weather, I can imagine the feeling

of having a load of large limestone boulders crashing down on to your deck. It would be very scary.

Marcella Hazan has written something about Italian cooking

which I think is entirely appropriate.

"In the relationship of its parts,

"the pattern of a complete Italian meal is very like that of a civilised life.

"No dish overwhelms another, either in quantity or in flavour.

"Each leaves room for new appeals to the eye and palate.

"Each fresh sensation of taste, colour and texture interlaces

"with a lingering recollection of the last.

"To make time to eat as the Italians still do

"is to share in their inexhaustible gift for making art out of life."

I was so pleased that it was only ten miles or so between one country and another.

So it's goodbye cafe au lait and Napoleon Bonaparte and hello, cappuccino and Garibaldi!

A few thoughts on leaving Corsica, where cheese and charcuterie were kings, strong flavours and stews,

chestnuts and sausages,

to Sardinia which gave its name to the silvery fish because sardines were in abundance around its shores.

I was looking forward to tomatoes, pasta,

sheep cheese, lovely wines.

I thought, "How different is this gonna be?"

But that's what I really like about a ferry journey. It really stirs up your imagination.

That was a bit startling. I think it said, "Tourists, remember, you're not in Italy."

Not exactly a very wonderful welcome.

I suppose it's a bit like in Scotland you see, "English, go home."

Or in Monty Python's Life Of Brian, "Romans, go home."

Do they still kidnap tourists here? I don't know.

Now, you may think I'm odd,

but the main reason for going anywhere is to find some particular food or drink.

The main reason for going to Marseille for me was to find the perfect bouillabaisse

and the main reason for me to come to Sardinia has been to find the source of Vermentino.

It's one of the best white wines of Italy, famous all over Italy,

and the reason, I think, apart from a little bit of oak in the wine,

is the vines really have to fight to gain nutrients

out of this really harsh soil, this granite soil.

That's what it's all about. It's about those vines finding their way down into the granite chippings

that gives this its precise, minerally flavour which I find so enchanting.

This area in the north of Sardinia is one of the largest producers of cork for the wine industry.

Forests of cork trees line the road.

They remind me of clipped poodles where the bark is stripped away,

but the march of the screw cap and plastic corks is getting stronger.

Even my friends in the food and drink business are singing the praises of the screw cap over cork,

so where does that leave a small family business like that of Marco Pasella?

Very important for us, for my family, for my factory.

Very, very important because it is my life, the life of the town.

I can't help feeling that I'm watching something from an archive.

In ten years' time, this could be a cork museum with old machines being run as a tourist attraction.

But I think that if you want a mature, fine wine for any length of time,

no-one has come up with anything better than cork.

Because in the big wine, Italian big wine,

there is the cork for 20, 25 years, 50...50 years.

And only of the cork, this material.

I find this so interesting because myself and my colleagues and everybody I know

is into the whole idea of slow food and naturalness of food,

but when it comes to corks, most people say, "No, we don't want corky wine.

"We only want a perfect bottle every time."

But haven't we got double standards in this respect?

In the same voice, we say, "No, we don't want to go to the supermarket

"and get uniform green and red peppers or apples that all look rosy and round,"

yet here's a guy that's providing us with exactly what we want as slow food lovers

and we turn round and say, "Give us a plastic cork."

I'll be seeing one of my favourite Italian cheeses being made

and the best is produced by shepherds in the hills - pecorino.

That comes from "pecora" which means "sheep".

When it comes to shearing, the shepherds help each other by going from farm to farm.

It's as if I'm stepping back in time, but it's like that a lot in Sardinia,

but not on the Costa Esmeralda.

Lussorio Puggioni is heating up the sheep's milk, putting in rennet and leaving it for a while

before the next stage of separating the whey.

It doesn't take long for the milk to set and form curds.

DOG GROWLS AND MEN LAUGH

I was brought up on a farm, but they gave up using these clippers in about 1958.

I remember one of the chaps on the farm called Charlie.

My eldest brother was being naughty and he pinched him

and he pinched him so hard that he actually pinched through his shorts

because his hands were so strong from working the clippers.

I'm just thinking this is a basic "how to make cheese" lesson,

but I've been in enormous factories wearing hair nets and white coats

and I must say I know which cheese I would prefer to eat.

I just love this. It's stirred with a branch.

It cuts up the curds absolutely perfectly.

I've said this before, but I'm always mesmerised by people doing things with their hands

with extreme expertise. I could watch him for ever. It's so relaxing.

There's nothing new in cheese-making. It's an age-old way of preserving milk,

which goes back 10,000 years when sheep and goats were first domesticated and put in herds.

There's even cave paintings of cheese-making. It's that old.

HE SPEAKS IN ITALIAN

He was saying that he just loves making cheese. He's been doing it all his life

and he loves being in contact with his animals.

In Britain, in most cheese-making, the whey is probably fed to pigs,

but here they make a second cheese, ricotta, which means "recooked".

He's bringing the temperature up again and he'll just gather what's left in the whey to make ricotta.

Fresh ricotta you must eat within 24 hours. Absolutely delicious.

I was also noticing that he is so scrupulous in his cleanliness in making this cheese.

Not only is he so expert, but everything is perfectly clean. He totally understands what he's doing.

After half an hour, the ricotta is just about ready.

This is a culinary first for me. We've all had ricotta,

but I bet very few people have had ricotta that's not 24 hours old, but like 24 seconds old.

I don't know how to describe it. It's like the best rice pudding you've ever tasted.

It's creamy and delicate. It doesn't taste like cheese. It just tastes like a lovely pudding.

That's how they do it. It's the real thing and I'm really pleased to have been there.

Now I want to cook with the pecorino and I'm going to make a spaghetti carbonara.

This really hard cheese is perfect for it. The other thing is a good chunk of pancetta.

Pancetta is very like bacon, of course,

the subtle difference being that it's cured for longer.

It's salted and hung up in drying sheds, like Parma ham,

for longer than bacon and has a more concentrated flavour.

It's absolutely essential in a load of Italian dishes.

It gives out a lovely, meaty, salty flavour in the background.

Just chop it into chunks or lardons

or, as they say in Italian, cubetti - little cubes.

One of the things I picked up in Italy, a little tip, is how to open a packet of pasta.

Don't mess around with the paper or get a knife, just go...

like that. Macho stuff!

There's loads of stories as to where carbonara comes from, but the one I like most

is from the Second World War when all the GIs were over in Rome.

They had loads of bacon and eggs and the Italians acquired them in a legal or illegal way

and came up with this dish - bacon, eggs and pasta.

With the pancetta, I put in about three cloves of chopped garlic,

a good fistful of parsley and spaghetti, which goes straight into the pan.

And another little tip I picked up in Italy, they often use a bit of the cooking water of the pasta

just to make a bit of sauce.

Perfect.

Another strong contender for the origins of this dish goes back to the days of charcoal burners

who worked outside the walls of Rome.

It's said they cooked bacon, eggs and cheese on their hot shovels,

hence charcoal, carbon, carbonara.

This is nearly as popular as spaghetti bolognese,

but it's much more typical of Italian pasta dishes because it takes no time to make.

I met this Italian chef not so long ago from Rome who said,

"Never use Parmesan or cream in carbonara."

I was a bit embarrassed because I was used to using both.

I said, "Is it all right to use Sardinian pecorino?"

"Yeah," he said, "but never cream."

Next to pecorino in importance in Sardinian food is this.

What's happening here

is these very happy and hard-working people are making a thing called pane carasau,

which literally means "music paper bread".

The reason it's called "music paper bread" is they first bake the bread like a big pitta,

then they separate it and bake it a second time until it comes out crisp and crackling,

a bit like music sheets used to be in the very old days when people played pianos and didn't watch TV.

I just was trying to find out, as one does, that there is always a reason for food

and what was the reason for this?

The point is it keeps for ever. By double-baking it like this, it completely dries out

and for shepherds up in the high pastures for six, eight weeks,

they could take something which wouldn't go off and would be perfect from day one to day 71.

It's early in the morning and I'm starving.

This is made with freshly chopped tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and salt.

It doesn't get simpler than that. Perfect bruschetta!

Bread, tomatoes and olive oil - the most common combination in the Mediterranean.

I'd be surprised if it ever tasted as good as that again.

Just before I came away, I was in the pub with a few people I know

and one of them was asking where I was going and I said, "Corsica and Sardinia."

They said, "Why both? They're both the same." I thought, "That's a bit of a shame."

Two weeks into the trip, I say, "There is no way they're the same."

Corsica is almost one big mountain range and the food reflects that.

You've got sausage, wild boar, chestnuts.

Sardinia is much lighter, it's much more fertile -

tomatoes, olives, wild fennel, myrtle.

Then I was thinking about them and they just go to those tourist hotels,

so of course it would seem the same. Cancun would seem the same!

When I came out of the ferry port in Sardinia, I saw this sign in the tunnel which said,

"Tourists, remember you are not in Italy."

Yes, I am in Italy!

One of the great success stories in Italy is agriturismo.

It's called "fermes auberges" in France

and it's geared to tourists really wanting to taste the real food of the countryside.

People are opening up their farms and inviting strangers to lunch, cooking stuff their grannies made.

Of course, this business relies a bit on set decoration.

These cheeses, caciocavallo, do it beautifully.

I've watched the way he's been roasting these suckling pigs.

It's about attention to detail. Simple food really requires thought.

It's just the way he's gently turning them over and putting the myrtle branches on there

and also basting them with the hot fat, the hot, flaming lardo

and he says that just gives it that special flavour and I can't wait to try it.

You don't have any choice of menu. This is typically what you get, suckling pig, which I love.

Some people would have trouble with these stuffed intestines, but not me.

It's making me very hungry. The smell is just wonderful.

This is real grown-up boys' stuff, this, all this meat.

I can't wait.

This is a typical Sardinian dish of pork, bacon and chickpeas.

You've got to have a serious appetite here and this is lovely -

wild fennel, ricotta and olive oil, pecorino cheese, of course, and local wine.

And this which is mincemeat in a bolognese type sauce.

Sugo carne, they call it, and a poached egg - delish!

And it's served on that music paper bread.

This is right in the centre of Sardinia. It's not a tourist area and it's May.

The cuckoos are going cuckoo in the valleys and I feel it's almost like a time of innocence.

That's the trouble with tourism and that's the trouble with programmes like this.

You come somewhere like this and have this beautiful food cooked like it's been cooked for centuries

and you enthuse about it to such an extent, the tourists come along and it's never the same again!

These people are cooking for themselves. In Sardinia, they're cooking to please Sardinians.

They're cooking with great love and something about tourism ruins it.

You don't have to travel very far here to find a village festival.

This is Loceri and events like this are really good to look for local food.

The people don't need too much persuasion to dress up. It's a statement of belonging.

It's like Padstow's May Day where all the locals dress in white with red and blue neckerchiefs.

SINGS IN ITALIAN

I'm intrigued by these hortensia, hydrangea leaves.

The thing is called coccoi de corcoriga which is pumpkin,

so it's a mixture of pumpkin, flour, lardo - the salt fat -

mint and olive oil and seasoning. I've never seen anything like it.

-Vuole saggiare?

-Mangiare, si.

It's OK. Grazie.

Very nice.

Very hot!

-Really good.

-Very good. Molto buona.

David, the director, asked me to join in the dancing.

My reaction was, "No, I can't do that."

Not without a couple of beers!

But nobody's drinking here. They're all really enjoying it and getting stuck into it.

I think that's testimony to the Italian temperament.

They're very extrovert and enjoy themselves without booze.

Some of the girls in there are so showing off like this and it's just lovely.

LIVELY FOLK MUSIC

SONG SUNG IN ITALIAN

This song is about sailing off to America because of the hard times in the past,

but on a night like this, you can see why so many are coming home.

# America

# America

# America... #

It started late morning and went on right through without a break till the early hours.

Nobody became tired and emotional or disgraced themselves and I bet everybody had a wonderful time.

ANNOUNCEMENT IN ITALIAN

Subtitles by Subtext for Red Bee Media Ltd