Lasagne - how should it look and taste?
"several layers of delicate, nearly weightless pasta spaced by layers of savoury but not overbearing filling made of meat or artichokes or mushrooms or other fine mixtures" Marcella Hazan
I was going to write this article the other day - after our babysitting effort at the weekend. Our four older grandchildren came to stay the night and there was the usual 'what shall I cook for dinner that they'll eat?' quandary. I decided to do lasagne only to be told politely by one granddaughter that she didn't like lasagne so would only have a small portion. But I went ahead anyway, and as it turns out they all loved it and had seconds, even thirds. Well the youngest doesn't really eat anything much so he just did his normal thing - although he too did eat some without too much protest. So I decided that I would write an article about lasagne - it is, after all, one of the world's great traditional dishes. It features in Robert Carrier's Great Dishes of the World and is one of the few to be carried over to his New Great Dishes of the World. Indeed it is so well-known that it is a Home-brand dish in all the supermarkets. More later on that.
So first of all a little bit on origins. And the first dispute. There is a bit of dither about whether the word comes from Greek, Latin or even middle English. There is an ancient Greek word 'laganon' that means a sheet of a pasta cut into strips. The word is still used - but now denotes some thin unleavened bread. They also have a word 'lasana' which means a trivet or pot, or even a chamber pot. The Romans borrowed this word and made it 'lasanum' which meant a cooking pot. Initially the Italians continued to use the word to mean the dish in which lasagne was cooked, but later used it to describe the food itself. Then in the 14th century the British had a recipe for a dish called 'loseyne' which consisted of layers of pasta sheets and sauce. No tomatoes though - they didn't come until later, for obvious reasons. So take your pick. According to Wikipedia the dish originated in Italy - in Naples to be specific - in the Middle Ages, when a recipe was first written down. Which rather goes against the British theory because they also have a recipe to prove it. Don't think the Asians have anything similar though. Personally I think something like it has probably been around for a very long time, and its true origins are now lost in history. One interesting thing I noted though - the 'original' recipe had hard-boiled eggs in it - as does Robert Carrier in both his original and later versions. I'll come back to this.
Lasagne is really another form of sandwich isn't it? And I really only draw attention to this because of yesterday's article on hamburgers. The basic idea - the constant - if you like is that the dish is layers of flat pasta - most probably the earliest form of pasta - a sauce and something else - meat, fish, vegetables ..., topped with cheese and baked in the oven. The basic idea can be varied in an almost infinite number of ways. Your imagination is the only thing holding you back.
The second controversy that I came across was whether the finished dish should be dry or runny. Here are a number of different pictures showing the possibilities.
As you can see they vary from almost completely dry - there doesn't seem to be much sauce there at all, to really fairly sloppy. Though I have to say my own version is sloppier again. And I actually quite like that. The grandchildren did anyway. Some of the food writers were a bit dismissive of the sloppier versions:
"it stood up straight, rather than oozing saucily outwards across the plate like the stuff which came out of the college kitchen."
I must be the college kitchen. And I must admit I fail to see how you can avoid this if you are layering your pasta with a juicy meat sauce and some béchamel sauce as well. Of the pictures above, top right is Delia's version (more like mine I think), bottom left is Marcella Hazan's (she is the acknowledged authority on Italian food), and bottom right is the Guardian's Felicity Cloake. Can't remember where the other one came from, but it seems to be a compromise version.
On the topic of the completely dry - there is currently a fashion for 'open lasagne' which seems to be more like the dry version above although it usually has a rather classier filling - something like asparagus - or maybe even avocado! It's one of those deconstructed kind of dishes. You cook the lasagne and your filling separately and then just layer them on the plate when it comes to serving time. Maybe you pour a sauce over it - or even 'drizzle with olive oil'. Not really lasagne is it?
For me, lasagne is one of those quick meals, although I do make my own pasta - a very easy task if you have one of those Italian pasta machines to roll it out. I know my method is not traditional, because I do not make béchamel sauce. I layer the pasta and the bolognaise sauce, then having scattered grated cheese over the top I then pour some cream over all of it and cook it in the oven. My bolognaise sauce consists of onions, garlic, minced meat, tomatoes (tinned or fresh), tomato purée and a beef stock cube. Depending on what I have available I may also have mushrooms, zucchini, carrot and celery in the mix, with leftover gravy, wine or, if nothing else, just water. Not really very authentic, but we like it. Well when my children were teenagers I had one son who would not eat lasagne - so he had spaghetti bolognaise instead. The things we do for kids! Now he loves lasagne. So I should have ignored him.
So what is authentic? Well number one is the fact that the meat sauce - or ragù should be cooked for hours and hours - 3 minimum. The meat sauce contains a mixture of beef and pork. Elizabeth David has chicken livers in hers, but then she's a bit of a fan of chicken livers. There should be at least six layers of béchamel, pasta, grated mozzarella, sliced hard-boiled eggs and bolognaise ragú finishing with a layer of bolognaise. I saw one blog where somebody had prepared the dish from Marcella Hazan's recipe - using home-made spinach pasta as well. It took him or her 7 hours in total and they said that although it did taste good it probably wasn't worth all that effort. So I think I'll stick to my version.
Going back to those hard-boiled eggs though. Initially I thought that Robert Carrier's version would be 'authentic' but no - he describes it as a 'light version' and uses sausage rather than meat. The two versions of his recipe do not vary at all really - well his later version has some crushed dried chillies in it and uses mortadella rather than sausage. Otherwise they are identical. Different enough from the 'authentic' to give it here though.
LASAGNE AL FORNO BY ROBERT CARRIER
450g lasagne, salt, 175g mozzarella cheese, diced, 175g mortadella sausage, (or other Italian sausage) coarsely chopped, 3 hard-boiled eggs, sliced, 50g Parmesan cheese, freshly grated, 225g ricotta cheese, crumbled, salt and freshly ground black pepper, crushed dried chillies, butter.
Tomato sauce 1.4kg tomatoes, coarsely chopped , 3 tablespoons tomato purée, 3 large carrots, coarsely chopped, 1 Spanish onion, coarsely chopped, 3 sticks celery, coarsely chopped, 2 cloves garlic, chopped, 2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley, finely grated zest of 1/2 lemon, 2 tablespoons olive oil, 25g butter
To prepare the tomato sauce In a thick-bottomed saucepan, combine the tomatoes with the tomato purée and chopped carrots, onion and celery. Stir in the garlic, parsley and lemon zest. Simmer for 1 1/2 hours, then press through a fine sieve. Return the puréed sauce to the pan. Season generously with salt and freshly ground pepper and simmer until thick. Just before using, stir in the olive oil and butter.
To prepare the lasagne Preheat the oven to 190ºC and butter a large rectangular baking dish. Cook the lasagne sheets, a few at a time, in boiling, salted water, for 6 minutes only. Drain carefully.
To assemble the dish Line the baking dish with a layer of lasagne sheets. Add a layer of diced mozzarella cheese, a layer of chopped mortadella, and a layer of sliced hard-boiled eggs. Sprinkle generously with freshly grated Parmesan cheese and crumbled ricotta cheese. Season to taste with salt, freshly ground pepper and crushed dried chillies, and moisten with the well-seasoned tomato sauce. Repeat, using the same quantities, until you have several layers and all the ingredients are used up, finishing with tomato sauce. Dot with butter and bake in the preheated oven for about 30 minutes. Serve immediately.
Yes it's a bit complicated. Nigel Slater said that he no longer made lasagne because it was so complicated and time-consuming. But modern industry is here to help. Knowing that I was going to write about lasagne today I did a research trip to the supermarket where I found everything except béchamel sauce. You can buy all the components separately - dry lasagne, curly dry lasagne, wholemeal lasagne, spinach lasagne, even gluten-free lasagne, fresh lasagne, jars and jars of various pasta sauces - all of which, I have to say looked much the same to me and didn't look as if they had much meat in them. Not something I would buy anyway. Then you can buy prepared lasagnes from the chill cabinet or the freezer. It's such a standard dish that you can get home brand versions of it. They looked sort of OK, but I guess you would have to try them to see. And they weren't that cheap either. So yes I would use the dry or fresh lasagne sheets to cut a few corners, but I don't think I would use any of the sauces in jars or the premade versions. Do like me and use cream instead of béchamel. Or milk even.
As for the variations - well endless. More or less every kind of vegetable you can think of though spinach is a regular one. Delia has a lovely recipe for a spinach and ricotta lasagne which has just a touch of gorgonzola cheese to add bite. Then you can use different meats, fish, shellfish... Jamie Oliver has a recipe in his Italian book for a hunter's lasagne which is made with several different kinds of shredded and pre-roasted game type meats. You can vary the sauce too. No doubt there is even a curried version out there. I even saw someone asking if you would have chips with your lasagne! Don't laugh. My nephews asked for chips with pizza in France once, and they wanted vinegar on the chips too! So I'm sure there are all sorts of horrors out there. But then the British in particular are very good at that sort of disaster.
And here is Jamie's Classic Family Lasagne. He's British, so they don't always do awful things to food. Looks tempting doesn't it?
