Well this just changes everything

[Guest GregM]

Britain May Have Had Lasagna Before Italy

By SUE LEEMAN

The Associated Press

Tuesday, July 15, 2003; 7:31 PM

LONDON - 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."

Crompton didn't claim that the English invented lasagna, and other food historians have suggested the dish has a very ancient history.

Crompton and others who are organizing a medieval festival to be held at Berkeley Castle in southern England later this month found the recipe in "The Forme of Cury" at the British Museum, commissioned by King Richard II in 1390 and regarded as one of the world's oldest recipe books.

"We prepared the medieval lasagna yesterday at the castle and it was delicious, although strangely sweet and spicy," Crompton said. Among its ingredients are cinnamon and saffron, not usually found in the Italian version.

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.

Predictably, the Italians are having none of it. "Whatever this old dish was called, it was not lasagna as we make it," The Daily Telegraph quoted an Italian Embassy spokesman as saying.

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."

Berkeley Castle's festival, featuring medieval jousting and a siege re-enactment, is on July 26 and 27.

[kenny weir]

Reminds me of a sandwich board potted outside a pub in the midst of Sydney's Chinatown a few years back.

It read: "Australian food - lasagne, spag bol."

[A Lark Ascending]

Perhaps the Scandanavians invented lasagne!

After all the Vikings invaded Britain (thus the recipe above) and Sicily and southern Italy.

Any ancient lasagne recipes in Normandy?

I feel a PhD comng on!

Edited July 16, 2003 by Bev Stapleton

[brownie]

Not only the Vikings invaded Britain but the Romans were there also, before the

Vikings. Claudius' s Roman Legions landed on the island in AD 43.

They must have brought some pasta with them!

[kenny weir]

Actually, I think pasta (noodles anyway) came from China. As did motor scooters. And parmesan.

[A Lark Ascending]

Not only the Vikings invaded Britain but the Romans were there also, before the

Vikings. Claudius' s Roman Legions landed on the island in AD 43.

They must have brought some pasta with them!

Pasta brought to Britain from Italy. There's no PhD in that, however long ago.

But pasta brought to Italy from Denmark....

The bookshops are full of histories of nutmeg, ice transport, cod and the like at present.

I'm thinking of doing an Erich von Daniken on it. "Spaghetti of the Northern Gods" perhaps.

Even better, "Spaghetti of the Northern Gods and the Blood of the Holy Grail: The Culinary Origins of the Templers, the Freemasons and the Mafia"