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DISGUSTINGLY DELICIOUS

COW TESTICLES, FROG SHAKES AND MAGGOT CHEESE ARE ON THE MENU

AUTHOR SOLEDAD ROMERO MARIÑO ILLUSTRATOR MONTSE GALBANY PUBLISHER WELBECK PUBLISHING PRICE £12.99 / $17.95 RELEASE OUT NOW

I t’s tough to pick a single foodstuff in Disgustingly Delicious that the thought of eating doesn’t immediately turn our stomachs. Why don’t we start with the French delicacy ‘Escargots de Bourgogne’, or snails? They are traditionally sautéed in butter with garlic and parsley, then picked from their shells and eaten on crusty bread. These critters might not be to your taste, but once prepared they’re each a tiny morsel with a slightly chewy texture that take up the pleasant savoury flavour of the stock they’re cooked in.

If you’re a little adventurous with your food and can get past the thought of them alive, sliding into the compost heap in your garden, then you might even enjoy eating snails. They’re much less of an acquired taste than the fermented dishes you might encounter around the Arctic Circle, like hákarl: a Greenland shark that has been buried for up to 12 weeks before the rancid-smelling and putrefying fish is dug up and hung for a few months. Or Sardinia’s casu marzu, a perfectly decent soft cheese that’s been left for flies to lay eggs in. When the maggots have hatched and begun feasting on the cheese, turning it into a weeping yellow heap with an overwhelmingly pungent odour, then it’s considered ready to eat. Unsurprisingly, given that there are still live maggots inside it, eating this delicacy can give you a nasty case of food poisoning, and the sale of casu marzu is actually illegal in Italy.