The well-loved cookbook challenge #7
What recipe do you use to make lasagne?
For the benefit of new subscribers who are unfamiliar with the well-loved cookbook challenge it’s about revisiting the bespattered books on our shelves, the ones we go back to time after time.
It stems from one of my most popular posts where everyone piled in to share the books they loved most and prompted the idea of cooking a recipe each month from a book that’s 10 years old or older.
It’s a regular free feature on my Substack but it you’d like my personal food and wine tips as well as other exclusive content you can subscribe for as little as £5.
I have to say I love a lasagne (or lasagna if that’s your preferred spelling) but rarely make the effort these these days although it is the ultimate crowd-pleasing dish.
The one I generally fall back on - still a favourite with my grown-up kids - is a somewhat inauthentic lasagne bolognese originally from a Josceline Dimbleby book, I think, but I’ve made it without a recipe for years. I’d struggle to tell you the quantities: I just make it by eye.
The one I really hanker after is the vincisgrassi from Ann and Franco Taruschio’s Leaves from the Walnut Tree (1993) but it never tastes quite as I remember it when I ate it at their restaurant. It’s made with mushrooms, cream and truffles (if you’re lucky) rather than meat and is just the most delicious thing. (You can also find it on the Guardian website.)
Anna del Conte has a more extravagant version with calves’ brains, chicken livers and sweetbreads in her Gastronomy of Italy (2013) though last time I made it I used the recipe in Rachel Roddy’s more recently published A-Z of pasta (below).
I’ve also taken, as I confessed a couple of years back, to making a salmon and spinach lasagne based on a recipe from another new-ish book Chefs at Home which sounds a bit of a abomination as it also contains cheese but it’s honestly much nicer than it sounds. My version of the recipe, cutting the cheese down slightly, is here.
Apart from introducing different ingredients, the fashion now is to try and shortcut the process of making lasagne any way you can, for example making it without béchamel or without pre-cooking the lasagne sheets both of which I find leaves it slightly dry.
Others just break the sheets up and lay them randomly over the filling which means you don’t get those lovely layers. Well, actually you don’t get those lovely layers anyway unless you make the pasta dough yourself and roll it out thinly.
In general I don’t think lasagne is about time-saving hacks though there are always exceptions. For example I like the look of the Quick Calabrian Lasagne in Nigella Lawson’s Nigelissima (2012) No béchamel but Nigella is a writer you feel you can trust with a lasagne. Maybe that’s the one I’ll try this month.
So where do you stand on lasagne? Do you still make it and if so does your version come from an old and treasured cookbook or have you been seduced by more recent recipes?
In other words is the lasagne you make now better than or not as good as it used to be?
If you enjoyed this post and it made you want to cook - or just eat - lasagne, maybe you’d give it a ❤️.
Lasagne is a labour of love to make properly - I like the fact that Nigella's recipe in Cook, Eat, Repeat is called 'Lasagne of Love'. The lasagne I hanker after was made by an Italian lady called Evalina, a friend of my family in Tuscany and a great cook - it had several layers of fine fresh pasta (she made her own) interspersed with just enough but not too much tasty ragu and was at once satisfying and elegant, with the fine pasta layers giving a great texture. I've never managed to replicate it successfully!
We live in the area that's home to vincisgrassi, (which translates as 'winning fats', which in turn gives a clue as to why it's so tasty). Very much born out of thrift, it relies on the very finely chopped trimmings and leftovers from preparing duck, goose and maybe pork for other dishes and a dryish tomato based sauce. No bechamel. It's deliciousness comes from the myriad layers of wafer thin, hand made pasta. The sort that nonna steadily rolls out on a table top covered in an old cotton cloth. It's a real labour of love. Often put into a pizza or bread oven once the main cooking is over and left for a few hours. Luckily, available at local restaurants for those who don't have all day to prepare it.