Uuuuuurgh! Don't eat that

East, West, home food is best, or at least the most acceptable. But the global menu is constantly expanding to take in foreign dishes that range from unusual to downright horrifying. Here are some that will never make haute cuisine.

Sardinian cooking has an Italianate base, which I relished on a brief visit there. But nobody offered me Casa Margu, the jumping cheese. This is made from sheep's milk mixed with piophila-casei or "the cheese fly". The resulting crop of larvae remain impressively athletic while in the cheese and emit an extremely smelly liquid known as lugima or "tears".

The larvae jump 5cm or more from their surroundings, perhaps because they can't stand the smell either.

Another Sardinian delicacy was discovered by the cooker-scholar icon Elizabeth David. She asked a local granny if she knew of any special Christmas dishes. "Ah, Christmas," the old duck said in rapture: "It just wouldn't be Christmas without roast cat."

In Mexico, if you are not careful, someone may offer you Escamoles - a cheese with a cottage-cheese texture made from the eggs of giant, venomous, black ants. The eggs are harvested and mixed with guacamole before being cooked as a taco filling.

Fortunately, I cannot tell you how they taste.

Scandinavians are renowned for their healthy diets, so why not try Norway's great delicacy - lutefisk? Here's why not: it is made by leaving cod or white fish fillets in a bath of caustic soda for around a dozen days. But you must get the fish out at just the right moment - when it is still a glassy jelly but has not yet turned into soap.

This deadly poison will incinerate your stomach unless you get rid of the caustic soda. Soaking in fresh water changed daily for six days and then cooking the residual jelly does the job, surviving Norwegian chefs claim. I don't believe them. The lutefisk is eaten with lots of mustard and crisp-fried bacon, obviously to add a flavour other than that of caustic soda. You must not use silver cutlery when eating this dish, I was told. It eats away the silver while you eat it.

In Korea I managed to resist an invitation to try a health tonic named baby mice wine. The recipe is easy. Find some newborn mice and add a handful of them to a bottle of rice wine. You could call it nice-mice-rice-wine. It is not polite - locally - to pick the bodies of the baby mice from your glass before drinking.

And in Manila, where I had the good luck of interviewing the most wonderfully titled and named Cardinal Sin, I easily resisted his attempts to make me try balute. The recipe: incubate duck eggs until they are ready to hatch. Boil, shell and eat. The feathers, beak, small bones and residual yolk are said to yield a delicious flavour with an unusual, crunchy texture.

Similarly, I had no difficulty refusing two Chinese dishes I encountered in Hong Kong and Saigon (now Ho Chi Min City to everybody except those who live there). One is the famous bird's nest soup. The nests are made annually in caves, mainly in Borneo. They are made from the saliva of two types of swift - which they use to gum together their grass and twig nests. I once tasted the soup. It tasted gummy.

The other great delicacy was available at enormous expense in Saigon's Cholon Chinese town. For one: take a monkey and tie it to a chair. When your guests are ready, slice off the top of the monkey's head and... no, I can't go on with the details.

Any Cholon Chinese gourmet will tell you that this delicacy is no longer on the menu. But what were those monkeys doing in two pet shops I checked in the town?

Last is the injin (engine, because the brains drive the animal) of East Africa, and South Africa's skop: roasted or boiled sheep's or pig's or goat's head. I've eaten a couple braaied in Kenya and Uganda when nothing else was on offer, but I'm not a good enough at picking out the meat to try them again. But I enjoy it when injin is made into brawn - meat fragments in a delicious savoury jelly.

Clare was boasting about her grandmother's brawn once when we were based in Nairobi. Fine, I said, if I get you a pig's head, will you make us some? Sure, said Clare. I ordered one for her from our local butcher. Unfortunately, I had to go to Angola in a hurry for eight days. When I got back and inquired about the brawn, I discovered that the pig's head had been buried in the garden.

"I couldn't face it," said Clare.

• This article was originally published on page 13 of The Sunday Tribune on October 18, 2009