LASAGNA is a dish loved all over the world. Its tangy and rich layers of flat pasta, cheese, cream, tomato sauce, and minced meat make it a popular item at Italian restaurants, among home cooks and in supermarket frozen food aisles.
Lasagna has also found its way into popular culture via a certain rotund orange cat.
While it can be considered a traditional Italian dish, it has been claimed that a recipe for a dish closely resembling lasagna was found in an English cookbook written at the end of the 14th Century – with some even using this to claim that England and not Italy invented the pasta dish we all know and love.
Is this true?
VERDICT:
TRUE
While the jury is still out as to whether the English actually invented lasagna, what is indeed true is that the recipe for a dish resembling lasagna is found in the 1390 cookbook “The Forme of Cury” in which “Cury” is the Middle English word for cookery.
The book—believed to have been written by King Richard II's master cooks—includes a recipe for a dish called “loseyns.”
The writer then adds that to make “losyens”, a cook should make a paste of flour and water, roll it out flat and thin, dry them and then boil the dried sheets in broth.
From this, the cook is told to layer the pasta in a dish, grate cheese, and sprinkle spice powder over each layer before serving it.
There are no tomatoes mentioned in the recipe of “losyens” as tomatoes only became a part of British cooking several hundred years after the book was written.
Here is the recipe, as translated into modern-day English by the Foods of England Project on their website.
“Take good broth and put in an earthenware pot, take fine white flour and make with it a paste with water, and make from that foils as thin as paper with a roller, dry them hard and seethe (boil) them in the broth.
Then take grated soft cheese and lay it in dishes with spice powder, and lay over the pasta layers as many and as thick as you wish, and above powder and cheese, and so two or three times and serve it forth,” it writes.
References:
http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/loseyns.htm
https://www.smh.com.au/world/british-uncover-recipe-from-the-pasta-20030717-gdh41i.html
https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2016/12/forme-of-cury-a-medieval-english-cookbook.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3067455.stm
