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.
The Irish had no potatoes and the Italians no tomatoes. Nobody had corn, chocolate or tobacco. Europe sucked before the new world was discovered.
Lasagna is actually pasta doing a Testudo formation.
What was it made with then?
Max Miller's channel is really good
Did you know the plural of Lasagna is Lasagne?
This YouTube is so interesting!!