banned from commercial sale<\/a>, but Sardinians have been eating it, jumping grubs included, for centuries.<\/p>\n\u201cThe maggot infestation is the spell and delight of this cheese,\u201d says Paolo Solinas, a Sardinian gastronome.<\/p>\n
He says some Sardinians cringe at the thought of casu marzu, but others raised on a lifetime of salty pecorino unabashedly love its strong flavors.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome shepherds see the cheese as a unique personal pleasure, something that just a few elects can try,\u201d Solinas adds.<\/p>\n
When tourists visit Sardinia, they usually wind up in a restaurant that serves porceddu sardo, a slowly roasted suckling piglet, visit bakers who sell pane carasau, a traditional paper-thin flatbread, and meet shepherds who produce fiore sardo, the island pecorino cheese.<\/p>\n
Yet, if you are adventurous enough, it\u2019s possible to find the casu marzu. It shouldn\u2019t be seen as a weird attraction, but a product that keeps alive an ancient tradition and hints at what the future of food might look like.<\/p>\n
Giovanni Fancello, a Sardinian journalist and gastronome, has spent his life researching local food history. He\u2019s traced it back to a time when Sardinia was a province of the Roman empire.<\/p>\n
\u201cLatin was our language, and it\u2019s in our dialect that we find traces of our archaic cuisine,\u201d Fancello says.<\/p>\n
There is no written record of Sardinian recipes until 1909, according to Fancello. That\u2019s when Vittorio Agnetti, a doctor from mainland Modena, traveled to Sardinia and compiled six recipes in a book called \u201cLa nuova cucina delle specialit\u00e0 regionali.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut we have always eaten worms,\u201d says Fancello. \u201cPliny the Elder and Aristotle talked about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ten other Italian regions have their variant of maggot-infested cheese, but while the products elsewhere are regarded as one-offs, casu marzu is intrinsically part of Sardinian food culture.<\/p>\n
The cheese has several different names, such as casu becciu, casu fattittu, hasu muhidu, formaggio marcio. Each sub-region of the island has its own way of producing it using different kinds of milk.<\/p>\n
\u2018Magic and supernatural events\u2019<\/h2>\n
Foodies inspired by the exploits of chefs such as Gordon Ramsay often come in search of the cheese, says Fancello. \u201cThey ask us: \u2018How do you make casu marzu?\u2019 It\u2019s part of our history. We are the sons of this food. It\u2019s the result of chance, of magic and supernatural events.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fancello grew up in the town of Thiesi with his father Sebastiano, who was a shepherd who made casu marzu. Facello shepherded his family\u2019s sheep to grazing grounds around rural Monte Ruju, lost in the clouds, where magic was believed to happen.<\/p>\n
He recalls that, for his father, casu marzu was a divine gift. If his cheeses didn\u2019t become infested with maggots, he would be desperate. Some of the cheese he produced stayed for the family, others went to friends or people who asked for it.<\/p>\n
Casu Marzu is typically produced at the end of June when local sheep milk begins to change as the animals enter their reproductive time and the grass dries from the summer heat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Italian island of Sardinia sits in the middle of the Tyrrhenian Sea, gazing at Italy from a distance. Surrounded by a 1,849-kilometer coastline of white sandy beaches and emerald waters, the island\u2019s inland landscape rapidly rises to form hills and impervious mountains. And it is within these edgy curves that shepherds produce casu marzu, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2155,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newstoday24hour.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newstoday24hour.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newstoday24hour.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newstoday24hour.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newstoday24hour.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2154"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newstoday24hour.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2156,"href":"https:\/\/newstoday24hour.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154\/revisions\/2156"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newstoday24hour.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newstoday24hour.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newstoday24hour.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newstoday24hour.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}