Italy has given the world many gifts, from eyeglasses to espresso to Stanley Tucci, but of all the magnificent things to come from the Bel Paese, perhaps the most delicious is lasagna. This dish has been around in many forms for centuries. Lasagna traces its origins to Rome in the first century, with a clearer ancestor emerging in the Middle Ages, though it didn’t look like you might expect.
The “Liber de Coquina” was written around 1300, making it one of medieval Europe’s first cookbooks, and it provides a good starting point for the noodles. This recipe called for yeast-leavened dough, making it closer to a bread dough than pasta dough, but the technique was still similar: “Take leavened dough and make a round cake (tortellum) as thinly as you can. Then, divide it into square pieces the size of three fingers. After, have boiling salt water ready and place the aforesaid lasanas there to cook. And when they have been strongly cooked, take grated cheese.”
The recipe calls for a layer of spices, then overlays the dough and more spices repeatedly, and asks you to eat the combination with a wooden skewer (forks didn’t become widespread in Italy until the 14th century). The spice blend is surprisingly autumnal, containing ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and grains of a paradise, an African spice that’s not technically a kind of peppercorn but tastes like it should be.
History of ancient lasagna
Lasagna’s history is one of constant innovation determined by the ingredients and tools available at the time, whether using food scraps in Ancient Greece or adding sodium citrate in Lessons in Chemistry’s recipe. That constant absorption of techniques is part of what allowed it to endure since the Roman Empire — or even before.
Many consider the predecessor of lasagna to be laganon, an ancient Greek noodle made from strips of dough fried in oil. That said, the earliest recorded mention of lasagna comes from a cookbook called De Re Coquinaria, or “The Art of Cooking” by a Roman named Marcus Gavius Apicius, likely put together in the 4th century. The “Apician Dish” called for small pieces of whatever meat was on hand, including sow’s belly and figpecker breast, cooked in broth and raisin wine. “Spread [the ragout] out in single layers with thin pancakes in between; put in as many pancakes and layers of meat as is required to fill the dish,” the recipe states. That certainly sounds like a lasagna in practice, if not in appearance!
Fast forward a few centuries and there’s a simple reason the medieval version looked so different from the modern: lack of tomatoes. Tomatoes originated in South America and didn’t gain traction in Italy until the middle of the 16th century. The first tomato sauce recipe in Italy wouldn’t come about until 1694. Lasagna that predated the game-changing fruit had to take a different approach, including a very different flavor profile.
