I Like My Cheese Still Moving

[plumtreeblossom]

At the honey extraction party that pheromone and I went to yesterday (much like the one I wrote about in the food_porn community last year) the post-extraction conversation went in several wrong directions. And by "wrong" I mean:




There's a reason it's illegal. It's pecorino cheese infested with the busy maggots of cheese flies, intentionally processed that way and consumed maggots-and-all on a piece of flat bread. Its a black market delicacy to be found in Sardinia and two regions of northern Italy (in a slighty different cheese base). It is said to be "the most beautiful gift you can give a Sardinian shepherd."

This revelation, from the vegan mouth of pheromone. This of course isn't the kind of information I can leave alone. I had to thoroughly check Snopes.com, but this is no hoax. It's Casu Marzu. The Italian government doesn't want you to know about it, because you'll go there and eat it while drunk and leave with intestinal parasites that you'll blame Italy for. But the locals pay up to three times the price of "clean" pecorino for it.

Learn more!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casu_marzu

Comments

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

I would have thought it an urban legend, but it didn't have a narrative hook, i.e., a celebrity who eats it for eternal youth, someone dying from eating it, etc. So I did more investigation than I probably should have, and yes, it really is a treasured guilty pleasure of Sardinians. :-)