There is a cheese in Sardinia, that island off Italy, which I most strongly recommend that one should try if one can say one has lived at all.
It’s called Casu Marzu (I’ll explain what that means in a moment) and is made of sheep milk. Yes, that’s right, of the milk of those woolly, stupid, baa-ing ambulatory chunks of wolf fodder. To be frank, I’ve never, probably like you, thought of sheep as a source of milk. Goats, yes, because everyone’s heard of goat milk – but sheep milk for human consumption? What next? The milk of the domestic pig?
Anyway, this is what happens: the sheep are milked, and after the stray strands of wool are (I assume) tweezered out or strained out or (perhaps) left in for the – uh – flavour, the cheese, called Pecorino, is made into blocks. Now if you want to eat the Pecorino you can, but that’s rather a waste of a good thing.
Because, if you want the real gastronomic adventure implicit in this experience, you then expose the cheese to a small fly known as the cheese skipper. This creature lays its eggs in any animal protein, such as the cheese – and lays, and lays - perhaps five hundred per fly per session. So now you have a rather eggy cheese. I guess you could make a cheese omelette out of it, but there’s more to come.
As time passes, the eggs hatch and the baby cheese skippers come crawling out of their cute little eggshells, hungry and crying for food. Fortunately for the poor things, the food is all around them – all that nice, tasty Pecorino. With (silent) cries of (unheard) delight, the babies – maggots they are called, yes, I must admit, maggots – throw themselves upon the cheese, and eat it, and eat it. Soon enough the mass of that Pecorino is crawling with maggots – thousands of them. And they are left to have the run of the cheese for three months, by which time that cheese is very soft and exuding liquid and the maggots are eight millimetres long and highly active. I shall be mentioning that activity later.
Now the cheese isn’t Pecorino any more – it’s the aforementioned Casu Marzu. Can you guess now what Casu Marzu means? Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, prepare to tickle your palates (in more ways than one) with...Rotten Cheese.
So how do you eat it?
First, as I said, this thing is Rotten Cheese. When things rot, they become, to human digestive systems, progressively inedible. So it is with this cheese. You let it rot for too long and it will become toxic and you can’t eat it any more and all that hard work goes to waste, not to mention the sheep milk and all those eggs. So you need to check if it’s rotted for too long. Fortunately you have the perfect indicator – you have all those wonderful maggots. As long as they are alive and wriggling, the cheese is fit to eat. Aren’t you happy about them now?
Fine. So the maggots are still alive and healthy. So, let’s get down to eating it.
Oh? I’m glad to know you have no scruples about eating live food. That’s logical. After all, even a raw carrot is still alive when you sink your teeth into it, right? But I admit that you may be among those squeamish people who, for some incomprehensible reason, draw the line at knowingly eating maggots. So, if you do not wish to consume those wriggling baby cheese skippers, you need to get them out of your cheese before you eat it. Here’s how.
Take your hunk of cheese, put it in a paper bag and seal it tight. Said bag shouldn’t have any holes or gaps anywhere. Now, maggots, as I’m sure you must be aware, are alive, and most living things breathe. As the maggots breathe inside the paper bag, the oxygen runs out and they become desperate for more. Cheese skipper maggots have a special ability – those tiny 8 mm maggots can, by a process of grabbing their own tails in their mouths and straightening suddenly, launch themselves in prodigious leaps of fifteen centimetres or so. As the oxygen runs out, they begin jumping around the paper bag, with a nice onomatoepoeic “pitter-patter”. When that ceases, you know the maggots have ceased as well, and you can get down to work.
There is a certain kind of flat bread they make in Sardinia, like the Indian chapatti. You moisten it, spread the Casu Marzu on it, lay on some really strong red wine (to mask the taste, I assume) and start chomping away. If you are among the braver set who don’t mind eating the maggots along with the cheese, you’d be wise to keep a hand over the bread and cheese so any maggots jumping ship don’t land in your eye (no, I did not make this up – that’s what’s written in Wikipedia). And no, the maggots do notaim for your eye – they don’t even know what eyes are. They’re just jumping for dear life, the poor children.
Like all good things (sex and marijuana make the list as well) Casu Marzu is officially banned in Sardinia by killjoy health officials, but who on earth ever managed to make a ban stick? The Sardinian black market has a trade going in Casu, and, naturally, the price is twice that you’d pay for a fresh, unrotten piece of Pecorino.
So how could you damage your health with this stuff? As long as the maggots are alive, the cheese is, apparently, edible. Now, Wikipedia claims that the maggots are very resistant to stomach acid and can survive to reach your intestines where they can, um, burrow into the lining with their strong mouth parts, causing enteric myaisis with nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and abdominal pain. This sounds to me, you know, like a really tough maggot to swallow (pun intended). If these maggots can’t survive confinement in a paper bag, how the hell are they supposed to breathe inside your stomach and intestines, where there is no oxygen at all, except any carried in with food?
So, you know, next time in Sardinia you know what to order. In the meantime, I’ll consider this post a success if even one of you thinks about Casu Marzu the next time you make yourself a cheese sandwich.
Great - I thought the worm in the tequila was bad enough (although I don't drink). That was a really interesting blog. No I will not try that cheese, although I do like a nice piece of pecorino. Poor maggots - what a way to die.
I don't see anything wrong with that. I've kept maggots in my mouth when fishing. You can eat some larvae. And some of the world's best cheese is full of mould. Will definitely try this (next time I'm in Sardinia lol)
I wonder how many people actually think when they're enjoying a bit of Roquefort, Gorgonzola, or Stilton on a cracker that they are, in fact, ingesting mold... bacteria... fungus!! lol
I haven't tried Casu Marzu... but I've eaten witjuti grub (Aussie wood eating larvae), deep fried scorpion in Vietnam and I've drunk Kopi Luwak (cat shit coffee) in Indonesia.
I guess eating maggoty cheese isn't beyond my realm of gastronomic adventure. lol
Naturally I came to read this after reading several "warnings" about "the cheese post". It's fascinating, actually. The cheese must be good if people, knowing the process, are still eager to eat it. It goes without saying that these talented maggots are not "potty trained", and that much of the finished product has gone through a maggot. When you think about it, the many thousands of items in the human diet got there because some one tried it, was still alive the next day, and told his friends. One use of communication for species survival; we don't have to keep trying the bad stuff because we know lots of things that won't kill us immediately.
I've drunk Kopi Luwak (cat shit coffee) in Indonesia.
As a coffee drinker and a cat owner, I had to research this. It seems it's the world's most expensive coffee. I could order enough for 8 cups for $49 usd. The luwak eats the cherry but doesn't digest the bean. The palm civet, Paradoxurus hermaphroditus. (interesting Latin name) is evidently both a labor-saving device and a flavor enhancer.
I heard about the "cat pee" coffee some time ago. My three cats just looked at me when I got near their box and said "no way" and now the weather is more cat friendly they disappear into the neighbour's gardens.
I haven't tried Casu Marzu... but I've eaten witjuti grub (Aussie wood eating larvae), deep fried scorpion in Vietnam and I've drunk Kopi Luwak (cat shit coffee) in Indonesia.
Sheep and goats are close in species so sheep milk isnt too bad but I wouldnt eat anything with maggots or other vermin unless I had a better than good chance at winning on Fear Factor. I cant believe anyone would make coffee with what comes out of any animal, cat or otherwise. Might as well eat warfarin.
The closest I came to eating food that was still alive was when I walloped a chocolate bar that had fungus growing all over it, after clearing off the fungus (or as much of it as I could see). It tasted wonderful but then one must never let good (or fungified) Guylian go to waste. And now that you know this, I must kill you.
The closest I came to eating food that was still alive was when I walloped a chocolate bar that had fungus growing all over it, after clearing off the fungus (or as much of it as I could see). It tasted wonderful but then one must never let good (or fungified) Guylian go to waste. And now that you know this, I must kill you.
have you actually tried the stuff? 
