Lasagna, Garfield's favorite dish of layered pasta stuffed with meaty tomato
sauce, ricotta and mozzarella cheese, right? Well
sometimes turns out lasagna is one of the most
complicated, and varied dishes i've ever researched for this show,
and the only way I could figure out how to discuss it was with this:
The Lasagna Family Tree. So today i'll show you how to make a medieval lasagna
as I tumble down the rabbit hole, and explore the genealogy of lasagna
this time on Tasting History.
Today is kind of special because I'm getting to pair with the fantastic
Chef Frank Proto from his channel Protocooks.
You might know Chef Frank for his fantastic four levels videos that he
does for Epicurious. So on Tasting History today, normal
episode talking about the history of lasagna but then i'm actually going to
appear over on Chef Frank's channel afterward
to talk about the more recent past of lasagna while he makes
his version of an American lasagna. So for today's recipe we're going to that
exact place that you think of when you think of lasagna, Medieval
England. That's right we have a recipe for
loysens in that 14th century cookbook that's
become rather perennial on this show The Forme of Cury. "Take good broth and
cook in an earthen pot. Take fine white flour
and make thereof paste with water and make thereof foils thin as paper with a
roller, dry it hard and boil it in broth. Take
Ruayn cheese, grated, and lay it in a dish with
powder douce and lay thereon the foils
large and many as thou might and above powder and cheese
and so twice or thrice and serve it forth."
So a couple of interesting ingredients in there. First Ruayn cheese,
we don't really know what it was lots of speculation but it was probably a
semi-soft cheese made during the autumn. I'm going to be
using gouda, it grates well and I like gouda and it
would have been available at the time, but you can go ahead and really use
whatever cheese you want. aAso the gouda that i'm using is rather
expensive so I wanted to take this opportunity
to doff my once again non-existent history cap,
and thank the Deans of the Larder, my Patreon
patrons who help me to afford all of the lavish ingredients
that I use here on Tasting History. The second interesting ingredient is
powdered douce, and in medieval times there were lots of
different spice mixtures going around but the main ones
were powdered and powder four powder douce was
definitely sweeter and powder four was more peppery
or spicy what we think of as spicy, and they would have varied depending on who
was actually doing the cooking. There wasn't a standard recipe
but I've used some old recipes to kind of come up with
my version of powdered douce. Now even though this dish is English and not
Italian I figure it's close enough to Italian that
I've decided to open up a bottle of Montepulciano and enjoy a glass of wine
while I rattle off the recipe for you. What
you'll need is two cups of bread flour, one half cup of water 1.5 quarts, or 1.5
liters of meat stock (beef or chicken), eight ounces of
semi-soft cheese, one tablespoon of sugar, two teaspoons of
ginger, two teaspoons of cinnamon, one teaspoon
nutmeg, one half teaspoon grains of paradise,
now you'll notice that even though it's usually considered sweet I
am adding in some grains of paradise into my powdered douce, but I
am going to listen to that 13th century Franciscan Friar
Jacapone da Todi when he said "He who looks at magnitude is often mistaken.
A grain of pepper conquers lasagna with its strength."
So to give our lasagna a fighting chance I'm only adding a little bit
of grains of paradise. So the first thing to do is to assemble your powdered juice
by grinding up any of the spices you might have and
mixing them together, then bottle it up and set it aside. Now
we make our noodles so pour your flour out onto
a clean work surface, and create a bit of a ring then slowly
pour the water, and work it into the flour. The
consistency is going to be quite different from a modern pasta noodle
which is usually made with semolina flour and
egg. This is actually going to be more like
an unyeasted bread dough. So once the water is incorporated
get to kneading just as you would if you were making a loaf of bread,
about 15 minutes by hand or about half that long if you're going to use a stand
mixer. Then cover it and let it rest for 20
minutes. Once that 20 minutes is over it's time to roll your noodles.
Now if you don't have a huge space to roll go ahead
and divide the dough in half, that's what I had to do,
you could even do it in thirds but you could also do it in one,
it's up to you. Now we want these noodles extremely thin,
so once you think you've rolled enough just keep rolling,
rolling, rolling, rolling. Keep them noodles rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling,
lasagnaaaaaaa. :D
Now if you do have a fancy pasta roller you can go ahead and use it. You'll
actually get to see one of those over on Chef Frank's channel
when he makes his lasagna but I did it by hand
like the recipe said so now that our pasta is rolled you can go ahead and cut
it pretty much to whatever size you want. You can cut it into long strips or even
big sheets, or as one 14th century cookbook
recommends into squares three fingers wide and that's going to
be one easier to boil, and two easier to eat
because they didn't use forks in Medieval Europe
at this point so it was going to actually be eaten
with a stick or with your hands, um and a big sheet of pasta is just not
gonna be that easy. So once you've cut your pasta, the recipe
says to let it dry hard, and that takes about a day but if you
want to make this all in one day that's okay.
Leave it for an hour, it's going to get hard enough
cause we're going to be boiling it afterward anyway, so not a big deal.
Whenever you are ready to boil your pasta just add your broth to a pot.
If you are going to be using an unsalted broth make sure to add some salt in
there, and set it over high heat until you get
a rolling boil. Then gently add your pasta, and boil for
eight to twelve minutes. The length of time is really going to
depend on one - how thin you rolled your pasta,
and two - how you like your pasta so if you wanted al dente maybe eight minutes,
if you like a little looser maybe 12 minutes.
Now as our pasta boils let us get to a-climbing that Lasagna
Family Tree.
We begin our journey at the bottom with the roots
of etymology. There is debate about even where the term lasagna comes from.
One theory is that it comes from the ancient greek word laganon,
meaning long strips of thin pasta. Another theory is that it came from the
ancient Greek word lasanon which meant a trivet and then in Latin that
word was turned into lazanum which meant more of
a full pot, so that could refer maybe to the pot that the
pasta was being cooked in who knows you know,
lasanon, laganon discuss. But as we move up the tree onto the first branch we
find an actual dish that might be a predecessor
to our modern day lasagna: patinam apicianam sic facies, or patina
ala Apicius. Yes, that Apicius who we dealt with in the De re coquinaria
episode. There's a recipe in the book that reads a bit like a layered pasta
dish, and a bit like what you might find in a
middle school sloppy joe. Chicken, fish, turtle, dove, sows utter, or
whatever else you can think of, and that's an actual part of the recipe.
WHATEVER ELSE YOU CAN THINK OF. So whatever mystery meat you end up
finding, you layer that with sauce and herbs and something called
laganum which the first century BC poet Horace describes as
sheets of dough, deep fried in olive oil, but while the construction is lasagna
adjacent and there is an ingredient that kind of sounds like lasagna
we really have to move to a totally different branch of the tree before we
find a dish that we would recognize as
something like lasagna. In the early 14th century a cook
believed to be from Naples contributed a recipe for lasagna to the
Liber de Coquina. It's the first recipe where we see cheese introduced,
and it's that recipe where I mentioned you cutting the pasta into
squares three fingers across. Also it describes eating it
with a stick so you would like skewer the pasta and bring it up to your mouth
because they didn't have forks, but that lasagna wouldn't have been
super cheesy like we think of when we eat American lasagna today.
Instead it would have been just lightly sprinkled on and we know that
because of the Black Plague, stay with me. In 1348 Marchionne di Coppo Stefani
bonaiuti, imagine having to squeeze that onto one of those "Hello My Name Is" name
tags. Anyway he wrote about the the mass
burials that were happening in Florence at the time.
"Earth would be taken and thrown down on them; and then
others would come on top of them, and then earth on top again
in layers with very little earth like garnishing lasagna
with cheese." Macabre but useful for our lasagna recreation today,
and that brings us to another 14th century recipe
from The Forme of Cury, the one that we're making today. Now this recipe was
made about 70 or 75 years after that first one that
I mentioned so if you ever find on the internet
people from England claiming that they made the first lasagna
they're wrong, and you will find it out there but they're wrong.
Moving on, one of the most important cookbooks of
all time was written in Rome in the year 1570.
While working for the Pope, Bartolomeo Scappi finished his
Opera which simply means work, no singing involved,
and I will definitely do an entire episode dedicated just to this book
in probably multiple episodes, because it is so paramount, but suffice it to say
it typifies Renaissance Italian cooking like none other
especially in its use of lots of spices, and lots of
sugar together. Scappi's tourte of lasagna is made
with pasta and trovatora, and parmesan cheese, and
butter, and then also has a liberal amount of
sugar and pepper, and cinnamon and if you're thinking well that's kind
of a flavor profile that is a bygone relic of the Renaissance,
there's something eaten still today called lasagne de Fornel which is eaten
in parts of Veneto around Christmas. It has walnuts and
butter, and apples, a sweet lasagna.
At the end of the Renaissance there was an ingredient introduced to Italy
that would lead to a rebirth of Italian cooking:
the tomato. I did an entire episode on the tomato where I made
an 18th century italian tomato dish so definitely go check that one out but
suffice it to say it changed the face of italian cooking
forever. No dish more than lasagna, and that brings us to the largest branch
on our Lasagna Family Tree whether tomato based or not. In Liguria
there is the delicate lasagna verde which is baked with pesto,
and in Marche they have the rich Vincisgrassi which is made with
chicken livers, and marsala wine and cream, and sweet breads
and truffles. Piedmonte has lasagna al sangue made with pork blood.
In Sicily it's lasagna al norma which is made with roasted eggplant,
and Taleggio lasagna is made with radicchio, taleggio cheese,
and mushrooms and is still popular today in Treviso,
but truly when it comes to the Jets vs Shark's style lasagna rumble
there are but two contenders: lasagna ala Napoletana which is served in Naples
around Carnevale, and lasagna alla Bolognese al Forno, which is
served during special occasions in the Emillia-Romagna region of Italy.
These two lasagnas cannot agree on anything,
even the spelling of lasagna. In the North they spell it with an -e at the end,
which is plural and refers I guess to the the
many layers of lasagna, but in the south they usually
spell it just with an -a at the end which refers I guess to
the singular lasagna as a whole, and those spelling conventions
went across the pond because in England they spell it with an -e at the end,
and in america we spell it with an -a at the end.
In naples it's made with wavy sheets of pasta, and
is stuffed with ragu and meatballs, and ricotta cheese, and mozzarella,
and sometimes hard-boiled eggs just for good measure. Then up in the
Emilia-Romagna region they make it with flat sheets of pasta that are tinted green
with spinach, creamy bechamel sauce, meaty bolognese ragu and lots and lots of
parmigiano-reggiano cheese. Each insists that they are the true
Italian lasagna, and countless families have been torn
asunder in their constant civil war. Now
regardless of where you stand on this very important debate
it does seem that there is a lasagna for pretty much every occasion
for everyone, and everywhere. Including places
outside of Italy, and we're going to cover those when I talk about that
last branch on the lasagna family tree over on Chef Frank's channel,
ProtoCooks where he will show you how to make his version
of an American lasagna, won't you chef? That's right Max and I'll teach you how
to make a classic Italian-American lasagna like I grew up with.
It's got fresh pasta, meat sauce, ricotta, mozzarella pecorino, romano cheese and a
little bit of love, so i'll see you over there. So i'll put a
link in the description to where you can go watch me over on
Chef Frank's channel talking about the more recent past
of lasagna, but until then it's time to finish our medieval lasagna.
So once your pasta is cooked pour it into a colander.
Then in a dish whatever size you want lay out a layer of pasta,
then a thin layer of cheese, and a sprinkle of powdered douce
then repeat twice or thrice. I'm going to be doing thrice
since i'm using a small bowl but if if you only get twice in there twice is
fine. And there's our loysens, 14th century
english lasagna. Now this lasagna is not baked or
or anything like that, it's at least it doesn't mention it, so
make sure to put the cheese on and everything
while those noodles are still hot, because the cheese is kind of melted,
looks pretty good but I think if they were cold
it wouldn't. Now as far as eating this a fork would be great but
as I mentioned they didn't have forks so i'm going to be using
a stick, like the Liber de Coquina suggests. Let's see how this goes.
Stab it, okay... Pry it up... okay i'm sure that they had a
better way of doing this. This could not be
the recommended method but actually that's not that bad uh, except that this
is going to be a huge bite, so turn away please.
Hm! :)
That's good, doesn't taste like lasagna like not at all
it tastes more like macaroni and cheese, like Kraft Mac and Cheese, um
with cinnamon and sugar, and yeah
it's weird but I like it. Okay yeah, it's good.
The stick is not maybe the best, I want a fork but i'm sticking with the
stick I suggest it, as as more of a
curiosity more than anything else, I wouldn't, I maybe wouldn't eat a whole
bowl full, but as a little appetizer that might be kind
of fun. Um yeah so that is Medieval
English lasagna and if you want to learn more about
modern lasagna, and how to make one you can join me over on Chef Frank Proto's
channel ProtoCooks, link is in the description and I will
see you next time on Tasting History.