JUST LIKE MOM USED TO MAKE

Britain May Have Had Lasagna Before Italy (SUE LEEMAN, Jul. 15, 2003, Associated Press)

After a hard day's jousting, what a medieval English knight needed was .... a plate of lasagna.

And he apparently could have it, according to British researchers who claim to have found a British recipe for lasagna dating from the 14th century - long before Italian chefs came up with the delicious concoction of layers of pasta topped with cheese.

"This is the first recorded recipe for a lasagna-based dish," David Crompton, one of the researchers, said Tuesday. "The Italian dish has tomatoes, which were only discovered two centuries later in the New World." [...]

To create loseyns (pronounced lasan), "The Forme of Cury" advises the cook to make a paste from flour of "paynedemayn," a substance that hasn't been identified; roll it thin and cook it with grated cheese and sweet powder. [...]

The recipe in full:

"Take good broth and do in an erthen pot. Take flour of paynedemayn and make erof past with water and make erof thynne foyles as paper with a roller; drye it harde and see it in broth."

Next, "take chese ruayn grated and lay it in dishes with powder douce and lay eron loseyns isode as hoole as you myght and above powdour and chese; and so twyse or thryse & serue it forth."

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 18, 2003 9:18 PM