On the island of Sardinia there's a cheese so extreme it's been outlawed across Europe — a pecorino deliberately left open for flies to lay their eggs in, so that by the time it reaches the table it's alive with thousands of tiny maggots, eaten while they're still squirming

On the island of Sardinia there's a cheese so extreme it's been outlawed across Europe — a pecorino deliberately left open for flies to lay their eggs in, so that by the time it reaches the table it's alive with thousands of tiny maggots, eaten while they're still squirming

Somewhere in Sardinia tonight, someone will pry the lid off a wheel of pecorino and watch the contents jump. The cheese is casu marzu, casu martzu in Sardinian, and the jumping is not a fault. It starts as an ordinary sheep’s milk pecorino. Instead of being sealed and left to age undisturbed, the wheel is deliberately opened: cuts made in the rind, or the top lifted off entirely, then left in a dark, ventilated room where the cheese fly Piophila…