I’m driving a dirt road in the wilds of central Sardinia. And I mean what I say by ‘wilds’. This rugged region in the sunburned Supramonte mountains was called ‘Barbagia’ by Cicero – i.e. ‘land of the barbarians’ – as even the Romans never quite managed to subdue it. Centuries later it became famous for bandits, kidnaps, local mafias – and casu marzu, the infamous ‘Sardinian maggot cheese’.
I turn to my resourceful local guide, driver and interpreter, Viola, as she negotiates the olive groves and goat tracks. ‘Do you really think we will find casu marzu?’ My voice is slightly falsetto with tension. Viola turns: ‘I hope so, there is a pretty good chance. And maybe we will find something even more unusual…’
But first, let’s rewind 30 years. I was a young travel writer when I first learned about this remarkable food. Casu marzu. I’d been given a profound philosophical assignment by a lad mag: to go to eat the worst foods in the world. During my research I unearthed lots of candidates – some of which I have written about in The Spectator before. And then I went off to eat them.
I scoffed tarantulas and ants in Cambodia, I chewed my way through cockroaches and field rat in Thailand, I nibbled algae, snake, beetles, duck embryo, dried frog and fermented silkworm larvae out of a tin in Seoul (it has possibly the worst smell in the world). Since then I have eaten rotting shark (hákarl), bear, whale, puffin, horse, rotting sheep and a small portion of dog.
What I have not eaten, however, is casu marzu. To explain in brief, casu marzu (literally: ‘putrid cheese’) is a traditional Sardinian cheese known for its extreme method of preparation, and its ‘bold flavour’. Made from sheep’s milk pecorino, it becomes unique when it is deliberately infested with living cheese fly larvae – maggots – which break down the fats even as they soften the texture.
This unseemly process creates a creamy, spreadable cheese with, it is said, a pungent aroma and defiantly intense taste. Commonly it is consumed with traditional Sardinian bread and strong red local cannonau wine. It is banned by the EU because the maggots can carry pathogens, and, if they survive your stomach acids, they might even eat their way through your organs and set up home in your lungs (this is apparently a ‘theoretical risk’). Despite the laws against it, maybe because of them, rebellious Sardinians still relish it, in their mountain fastnesses.
Ever since I read about this insane cheese, I became desperate to try it (I’ll leave it to shrinks to work out why). A few years later I got an assignment in Sardinia, and I spent half the time trying to source maggot cheese – asking hoteliers, restaurateurs, cheese shops, bewildered housewives, affronted tour companies. They all said no, for various reasons. ‘It’s the wrong season.’ ‘We don’t do that any more.’ ‘Somewhere in the mountains maybe, not here.’ ‘Do you really want a maggot to eat its way into your kidneys?’ ‘It’s illegal!’
I never want to eat it again, even as I congratulate myself on an ambition fulfilled
I slunk home defeated, cursing the pesky EU bureaucrats who were preventing me with their pettifogging laws from having my heart eaten alive by cheese larvae. But the desire still burned, and it was only reinforced when I saw it being eaten on TV – by Gordon Ramsay, and Anthony Bourdain – and the desire evolved into envy when friends told me they had found it. One actually sent a video from his Sardinian villa. I could see the maggots writhing in the cheese. Mmm!
And now, here I am, deep in Sardinian barbarian-land – and maybe close to casu marzu. The Land Rover skids a dusty corner. I see a long table laid out amid the sunny olive groves, next to some shepherd’s huts. Goats bleat. The table is surrounded by a happy band of friends; there is clearly rough wine, crispbread, Sardinian wild boar salami to be had. But is there maggot cheese?
The shepherd, Bruno, who is hosting the party, says – in Sardu – ‘Yes, we have the cake.’ At first I am bitterly disappointed. All this way for some sponge? But then I realise ‘cake’ is code to fool Brussels. The shepherd lifts a cloth, and there it is. After 30 years, I’ve found it. I can see, as in my friend’s video, all the live maggots writhing.
Invited to sit down, and given a big flask of cannonau for courage, the shepherd hands me a wodge of maggot cheese in a crispbread sandwich. I eat it without trying to think too much. It is surprisingly peppery, even spicy (is that the maggots?). It is indeed pungent. In fact it reeks. I never want to eat it again, even as I congratulate myself on an ambition fulfilled. This may be the most extreme food I’ve ever eaten.
Or is it? Now Viola reminds me of her earlier words. Something ‘even more unusual’. What can it be? Bruno emerges from his hut with a small, brown, soft, leathery gourd-shaped object. Then it is explained to me what this is, and my jaw drops.
I am being offered kid-goat stomach sac cheese. Known as callu du crabettu, it is an impossibly rare traditional Sardinian cheese made inside the dried fourth stomach of a milk-fed little goat. On its last innocent day alive, the kid is given a huge feast of the best milk. Then the kid is killed and the stomach cut out, washed, dried and hung for three months. The stomach’s natural enzymes act as rennet, curdling the milk and producing the cheese, safely inside the sac.
It is thought this is how mankind discovered the very first cheese – fermenting naturally inside the stomachs of milk-fed beasts that naturally produce rennet. So what I am about to eat is the Ur of cheeses, the holy Alpha and Omega of fromage, the original corpse of milk, the Cheeses of Nazareth.
Bruno slices into the stomach; the pale yellow cheese looks soft, and slightly oozing. He smears it on more crispbread, and hands it over. Girding my gastronomic loins, I close my eyes – and I eat. It is probably the best cheese I have ever eaten in my life.
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