I do not write a food blog. I have mentioned this before. But I accidentally ran into a reservoir of “Live and Let Live” on the Interwebs, where the attitude has increasingly become “My way or you’re scum”. So it is merely from an astonished appreciation of this hidden well of empathy that I write about Lasagna.
A local eating establishment (I don’t write restaurant reviews, either; I don’t need even more competition for a table on Saturday night) recently put “lasagne” back on the menu, and though it was good, I noticed quite a number of differences between it and the “lasagna” available in my hot lunches at school, or the similarly named dish my mother used to make. I still make my mother’s recipe, and, on one of those rare occasions when I have cooked for another person, served this to a young lady who was, um, polite about it. So I went in search of what real lasagna is, whether it MUST be spelled lasagne, and how far my mother was from the REAL recipe.
Well, as the Interwebs (and my computer’s spellcheck, which keeps autocorrecting it) inform me, we call it “lasagna” over here, though “lasagna” is the original Italian word, and is preferred on some menus. As for the traditional recipe, well, there ain’t no. My mother’s version is apparently just as authentic as the “hundred-layer lasagne” I have seen on specials menus.
The word comes from the name of the cooking pot for the noodles, and that the resulting entree is apparently one of the oldest pasta dishes known. Our distant ancestors liked putting down layers of cooked flat pasta, plopping stuff between them, and then baking the result. I am intrigued by the version for Lent, which was layered with walnuts, the version which included bacon and hardboiled eggs, the recipe which has the pasta cooked in chicken broth and then spread with chicken fat between the layers…there ARE no boundaries, so there is no foul territory (I will ignore the anchovy and olive version, personally, but you do you.)
There is also general agreement that the result needs to be covered with cheese, though people DO hold out for their favorite cheese/s for this purpose (and I was intrigued by the 12-cheese recipe). Certain cheeses are preferred if you have decided to make a Dessert Lasagna, an idea I have not encountered before today, making me feel I have been cheated. These are apparently served cold, which I understand, although if some chef got mixed up and baked the chocolate chip and peanut version I saw, I do not believe I would send it back.
I have now seen recipes for a “Southern Lasagne”, originating not from southern Italy but from the American south, involving grits and greens, an “Aussie lasagna” which involve kangaroo meat cooked in bear, and even an old favorite I ran into at another dining joint years ago, lobster lasagna. This last seemed to be part of a trend, not so much of favoring lobster as favoring alliteration, as I also saw Lentil Lasagna, Lamb Lasagne, Liver Lasagne, and a dish which is now on my “Only In America” list, “Lulla Kebab Lasagna”.
As I say, this attitude is stunning in a world which insists only the author of an article preserves the one and true WAY to do anything. In fact, I was so disoriented by the whole experience I had to counteract it by looking up pizza. As soon as I saw one lone angry voice holding out for the spelling “pizze”, I felt better.
Blogsy Babbles 