Activity: Baking/The History of...Lasagne.

Sourced from the Wikipedia page 'Lasagna'...because I live dangerously...

Lasagna, or Lasagne, is a very wide, flat pasta ( sometimes with wavy edges ). It is typically served in alternating layers with cheese, a sauce, and often other ingredients such as meat sauce, or vegetable. Typical of the central cuisine of Italy, many regional variations exist. In some areas, especially in the southern regions of Italy, the sauce is likely to be a simple tomato sauce and ragù, whereas in other areas, particularly in Northern Italy, a Béchamel sauce is used more generously . Lasagna has become a popular dish in other parts of the world, traveling from Europe to the Americas.

Lasagne verdi, which means "green lasagne", is pasta that incorporates cooked spinach.

Origin

There are three theories on the origin of lasagna, two of which denote an ancient Greek dish. The main theory is that lasagna comes from Greek λάγανον (laganon), a flat sheet of pasta dough cut into strips. The word λαγάνα (lagana) is still used in Greek to mean a flat thin type of unleavened bread.

The other theory is that the word lasagna comes from the Greek λάσανα (lasana) or λάσανον (lasanon) meaning "trivet or stand for a pot", "chamber pot". The Romans borrowed the word as "lasanum", meaning "cooking pot" in Latin. The Italians used the word to refer to the dish in which lasagna is made. Later the name of the food took on the name of the serving dish.

A third theory has been suggested that the dish is a development of the 14th century English recipe "Loseyn" as described in The Forme of Cury, a cook book in use during the reign of Richard II. This claim has been made due to the similarities in both the method described in building the dish and the two names. However this theory remains contentious as it can be argued that tomatoes are a fundamental ingredient of lasagna. These did not arrive in Europe until after Columbus reached America in 1492 (The earliest discussion of the tomato in European literature appeared in an herbal written in 1544 by Pietro Andrea Mattioli while the earliest discovered cookbook with tomato recipes was published in Naples in 1692, though the author had apparently obtained these recipes from Spanish sources.

*I'll take my lasagne vegetarian please. Garfield will take his with chips.