History & Culture
A look at how a dish with Roman-era roots became Bologna's most defended recipe, then travelled to become a supermarket staple in Britain and America.
The word lasagna traces back through the Latin lasanum, meaning a cooking pot, itself borrowed from the Greek laganon, a term for a flat sheet of dough that was boiled or fried. Layered sheet pasta has been part of Italian cooking for a long time; a manuscript known as the Liber de Coquina, compiled in or around Naples in the late 13th or early 14th century, describes a dish of pasta sheets cooked in broth and layered with cheese and spice. Food historians generally treat this as an early ancestor of lasagna rather than a direct recipe for the dish eaten today.
The version most people picture now, layered with a slow-cooked meat ragù and béchamel, is a much later invention. Tomatoes only reached Europe from the Americas in the 16th century and were not widely used in Italian cooking until well into the 18th, so a tomato-based ragù could not have existed before then. Béchamel is generally credited to French court cooking of the 17th century and made its way into Italian kitchens, particularly in Emilia-Romagna, sometime after. Bologna's cooks and food writers only really settled the pairing of ragù and béchamel in a baked lasagna during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Pellegrino Artusi's influential 1891 cookbook, La Scienza in Cucina e l'Arte di Mangiar Bene, includes recipes for baked pasta dishes close to the modern lasagne al forno, and in 1982 the Bologna Chamber of Commerce went as far as depositing an official recipe for ragù alla bolognese, a formal step that says something about how seriously the city treats the dish's identity.
For much of the 20th century, lasagne al forno in Emilia-Romagna was built around effort rather than convenience. A ragù that needed hours of slow simmering, a béchamel made fresh, then a bake in an oven that many households did not always have easy access to, made it a natural fit for Sunday lunches, Christmas tables and family celebrations rather than a Tuesday-night dinner.
Its spread beyond Italy tracks the country's own emigration history. Large numbers of Italians left for the United States between the 1880s and the 1920s, and postwar migration through the 1950s and 1960s carried Italian home cooking into Britain as well. In the UK, lasagne became genuinely mainstream through Italian restaurants in the 1950s and 1960s, then more decisively through supermarket ready meals from the 1970s onward. That ubiquity had an odd consequence in 2013, when a British frozen beef lasagne brand was found to contain undeclared horsemeat, a scandal that made front-page news across Europe and confirmed just how embedded the dish had become in ordinary British shopping habits.
A proper ragù alla bolognese starts with a soffritto of finely chopped onion, carrot and celery, cooked slowly in butter or oil until soft, before minced beef, often with pork, is added and browned. Wine and a small amount of milk are worked in alongside tomato, and the mixture is left to simmer for at least a couple of hours, sometimes considerably longer, so the fat renders fully and the sauce turns dense rather than watery.
Béchamel does the opposite job. Butter and flour are cooked together into a roux, then thinned gradually with warmed milk until it becomes a smooth, pourable white sauce. Its role in the finished dish is structural as much as it is about flavour: it fills the gaps between pasta sheets that a purely tomato-based sauce would leave dry, and it browns on top in the oven, developing colour and a slight crust through the Maillard reaction. Sheets of fresh egg pasta, traditionally the spinach-tinted lasagne verdi typical of Emilia-Romagna, absorb moisture from both sauces as they bake, softening from firm to tender while the layers set into something sliceable rather than soupy.
Move south to Naples and the dish changes shape considerably. Lasagna di Carnevale, eaten in the days before Lent begins, swaps béchamel for ricotta and adds meatballs, sausage and hard-boiled egg between the layers, a richer version tied to a specific point in the Catholic calendar rather than a general Sunday dish.
The lasagna that became familiar in the United States owes more to this southern, ricotta-based tradition than to Bologna's béchamel version, carried over by Italian immigrants through the first half of the 20th century and commercialised hard from the 1950s onward through jarred sauces and frozen meals.
In Britain, the writer Elizabeth David is often credited with introducing readers to Mediterranean cooking, lasagne included, through her 1950s books, well before the dish became a supermarket staple in its own right. What started as a labour-intensive Sunday dish from one Italian region is now cooked in home kitchens on nearly every continent.
Al forno is Italian for "from the oven" or "baked," used to distinguish an oven-finished pasta dish like this one from lasagna served straight from the pot.
It depends on the region. Emilia-Romagna's version, the one most associated with Bologna, uses béchamel between the layers. Naples and much of southern Italy favour ricotta instead, and that southern style is closer to what most American lasagna recipes are built on.
Ragù alla bolognese takes its name from Bologna, and its ingredients and method were considered significant enough that the city's Chamber of Commerce deposited an official version of the recipe in 1982 to help settle disputes over what counts as authentic.
Making it properly meant simmering a meat ragù for hours and preparing a fresh béchamel, then baking the whole thing in an oven, which made it a natural fit for Sunday lunches and family celebrations rather than a quick weeknight meal.