Despite the name, which seems Italian, Fiadone is a very popular dessert on the island of Corsica and is therefore a French dessert.
The name has an explanation. As you know Corsica was an Italian state linked to both Genoa and Pisa, long before Italy became a unified state. After various ups and downs, France bought the island in 1768 and incorporated it as one more French region. From that moment on, education, politics and everything related to commerce came to depend on Paris, both on the last Bourbon kings and on the Republic that replaced them. Curiously, it was a Corsican, Napoleon, who changed the Republic for an Empire. Born precisely in 1769, he had to learn French in a hurry to be able to enter a French military academy, although he always spoke until his death with a strong Italian accent. What he did in between for the 'Grandeur française' is well known.
Corsican is spoken in Corsica. Corsican was a dialect just like Sicilian, Ligurian, Piedmontese, Lombard, Veneto etc. They are all dialects of romances that are fairly intelligible to each other. After the unification of the country, the thinkers realized that if there was no common language, it would be difficult for all the inhabitants of the Italic peninsula to feel like compatriots. So they standardized the language based on archaic Tuscan. This language was chosen for prestige, since great literary works had been made in it. In 1861, when the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed, the vast majority of literary and administrative production was carried out in Italian but in fact very few people spoke it (less than 5%) cause they were speaking in the aforementioned dialects.
Little by little, education was replacing the regional or local dialects with the Italian we currently know, which became a kind of lingua franca, a common language that allowed communication between a Neapolitan and a Milanese, for instance. Currently the dialects are cornered and outside the prestigious cultural circuits, except in certain cases.
Neither Corsica nor Corsican participated in this process of normalization since it had been part of another political unit - the French one - since the end of the 18th century. On the island the fight focused on the defense of Corsican against the imposition of French, a fight that still continues today. For this reason, the Corsican speak about their mother tongue not like a dialect of Italian but like a singular language, since for many the divergence with current italian is obvious. For others, they are both 90% mutually intelligible languages and the differences are not significant and explained by political circumstances, in the same way that a 21st-century Madrid native would have trouble speaking with an 18th-century one despite the fact that both spoke Spanish.
So that's why Fiadone sounds Italian despite being considered a French dessert, but just for 'political' reasons, as you see. For more confusion, in certain regions of Italy they have a type of pasta filled with ricotta cheese that is served for Easter and is called Fiadoni (plural) but is not related at all with the dessert we are talking about.
Having said all this, the Fiadone is a dessert that uses brocciu, a type of cheese typical of Corsica that is made with the whey of milk from goats or sheep, or a mixture of both. It is the Corsican version of the French Brousse and the Italian Ricotta. If you have not tried brocciu, making the Fiadone with brousse or ricotta will be indifferent. Otherwise the flavor will vary, although I suspect that it will be difficult to find brocciu outside France, Italy or the same island.
INGREDIENTS :
500 grams (17 oz) of brocciu or brousse or ricotta cheese (the latter will be the easiest to find)
150 grams (5 oz) of sugar
4 large eggs
1 teaspoon of cornstarch
1 Teaspoon vanilla extract
1 lemon
First of all we crumble the cheese and let it drain in a strainer so that the whey it may have is drained. Then we mix it with the rods, if possible electric rods.
While continuing to beat we add the eggs one by one, waiting for the previous egg to be integrated into the cheese to add a new one.
Then add the sifted cornstarch, the sugar, the vanilla essence and the zest of the lemon peel.
Then we pour into a greased mold with butter - or silicone - and bake at 150 degrees celsius (300 F) for 30 minutes.
It is checked that it is solid and dry in the center - sticking a toothpick into it - and it is allowed to cool, then unmolding.
A really good dessert, with a flavor that you will not forget.