By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
NUORO, Italy -- In the kitchen of his rustic farmstead atop Sardinia's
Mount Lollove, Giovanni Antonio Costa smiles through missing front teeth.
It's time for a clandestine treat.
After pouring a glass of strong homemade wine, he sprinkles thin Sardinian bread with tap water to make it easier to fold. Then he extracts from a creaky cupboard a brown lump the size of a human head and deposits it on the rough wooden table.
It's a cheese. And it's alive.
The round of pecorino is filled with thousands of wriggling, transparent maggots, the larvae of flies. The 52-year-old Mr. Costa grins as he dips his fork in.
"We all go crazy for this stuff," he says. "But because it's prohibited, you can't buy it anywhere."
As the worms merrily jump up and down, cavorting all over the table, one of Mr. Costa's five brothers prepares a tasting by wrapping a morsel in the thin bread. "You don't have to look at them -- just put the thing in your mouth," he urges, chewing a mouthful of the stuff. He adds a piece of local folklore: "It's an aphrodisiac."
This moving delicacy is known as casu marzu, which is Sardinian for "rotten cheese." It first happened, like many culinary treats, accidentally. Flies laid eggs inside the cheese mass left outdoors to ripen. The eggs hatched into myriad maggots that promoted fermentation.
Mountain farmers produce sheep-milk cheese with worms in Northern Italy's Piedmont and Bergamo areas. But only on Sardinia has it acquired something of a cult following.
It is widely, but not openly, eaten. Italian health authorities consider cheese with worms damaged goods. Selling it or serving it can be punished with a hefty fine. That's why Mr. Costa offers his casu marzu in the family's private kitchen, rather than in the dining room of the inn his family also runs. Though the ban is enforced only sporadically, health inspectors try to ensure that Sardinia's casu marzu remains an illicit pleasure.
The cheese costs $7 a pound and up -- compared with $3 to $4 for a normal pecorino -- and has to be procured through a kind of black market or through connections. The outlaw status adds to the cachet. Casu marzu appears as the centerpiece of social occasions such as weddings and birthdays.
"I tasted it last at a friend's bachelor party a few weeks ago," says Giuseppe Pirisi, a Nuoro agricultural specialist with an interest in Sardinian folklore. "It's not that we like the worms. In fact, I'm not going to pick a worm off the table and eat it -- quite the contrary. What we like is the cheese itself, as it's part of our culture."
The cheese itself tastes rotten. Enzymes produced by the maggots cause the cheese to ferment and its fats to decompose. The result is a viscous, pungent goo that burns the tongue and can affect other parts of the body. One neophyte experienced a strange crawling sensation on his skin that lasted for days. And some of the wiggling worms jump straight toward the eyes with ballistic precision. To protect the eyes, some Sardinians recommend holding a hand over the sandwich.
Though worms can be removed from casu marzu, many Sardinians don't see a reason to bother. "It would make me sick to see a worm in a cake or a sweet, but I don't mind when it's inside the cheese," Mr. Costa says.
In fact, the presence of live worms is often regarded as proof that the cheese remains good. A really bad cheese wouldn't support maggots, which would die and make the casu marzu truly toxic.
Skeptics say it's already toxic. "Casu marzu's anomalous process of fermentation and decomposition can bring in toxins and bacteria that are damaging to the health," warns Antonio Mauro Carboni, director of the animal-products agency in Sardinia's autonomous government.
But not all officials hold such strong opinions. "True, with flies, it's impossible to provide health guarantees," explains Luciano Salis, a chemist and a director at the antifraud office of Italy's Agriculture Ministry in Sardinia's capital city of Cagliari. "But as a Sardinian and a man, let me tell you, I have never heard of anyone falling ill after eating this stuff. Sometimes, it tastes real good."
Some of Sardinia's culinary stars agree. "I personally like casu marzu a lot," says Mauro Frau, chef of the La Fregola restaurant in Porto Rotondo, an exclusive resort favored by the international yacht set. "But if I were to try serving casu marzu to my customers here, they'd simply throw it into my face with disgust."
So might many ordinary Sardinians, especially women, who tend to be more finicky than men about live worms in their food. "I can't stand this thing when the worms are inside," says Mr. Costa's 80-year-old mother, Antiocha, as her sons are happily feasting on larvae. "When I was young, a lot of cheese would go rotten, so I'd just put it out in the sun and wait for the worms to get out before having a taste."
Martina Cassitta, owner of the Monte Pino farmstead in northern Sardinia, also won't touch the larvae-filled cheese when any of her pecorino becomes rotten. She has a different method for getting rid of the worms, which she calls microbes because, like many Sardinian farmers, she believes the maggots come from the milk itself, not from flies.
Ms. Cassitta simply seals the cheese in a big paper bag and waits. "You can just hear the deafening tac-tac-tac as the microbes gasp for air and jump out of the cheese, hitting the paper," she says. She displays a piece of now-wormless casu marzu that looks as if it had been invaded by termites. "Once the noise ends, it's ready to be eaten."
Various attempts to make a similar-tasting cheese with chemical enzymes rather than worms are dismissed by cognoscenti as pale imitations. And some larger cheese makers produce their pecorino rot deliberately, aiming for the black market.
The illicit trade appears to be booming. On a recent day at Cagliari's bustling food market, a number of dairy vendors either had casu marzu hidden under the counter, or were ready to procure a round for the following day.
Mr. Costa believes that the way to solve the legal and health problems lies in simply abolishing the casu marzu prohibition. "We should be able to market rotten cheese if it's produced in controlled, sanitary conditions," he says. "So what that it's disgusting to some? Isn't beer just as disgusting during fermentation? Or the Gorgonzola cheese they make with mildew up north?"
This kind of talk angers people like Guido Gadola, owner of a cheese factory in the southern Sardinian town of Uta. "I don't think there is a lot of difference between rotten cheese and rotten meat," Mr. Gadola says. "OK, some people like it. But some people practice cannibalism, too."
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