Lasagna: what are its regional versions?
There’s no Sunday without grandma’s lasagna: kids and adults like it and it has now become a symbol of the Italian cuisine. The most popular lasagna is from Bologna, but it actually has many regional versions. Let’s discover together the origins of this worldwide popular dish and its many versions!
The history of lasagna
It is very difficult to get everyone to agree on a univocal recipe of lasagna, because every region has its version. The authorship of this dish has always been claimed by Naples and Emilia-Romagna, even though few people know that the history of lasagna started a long time before. Lasagna was already popular among Romans with the word “Laganon”, that indicated a thin layer of pasta made of wheat flour and baked in the oven or on the fire.
From the beginning of the XX century, instead, people started to talk about lasagna from Emilia, because restaurant owners in Emilia started to spread a recipe based on bechamel. It was much lighter than the one from Naples, which included meat and hard-boiled eggs. In conclusion, the duel between Naples and Bologna is centenary!
The classic recipe of lasagna
First of all, lasagna is a pasta with a rectangular shape, made with or without eggs, that is then boiled, layered and stuffed according to local versions. The classic recipe of lasagna comes from Bologna, despite being a traditional dish from Emilia Romagna. If you want to prepare a perfect lasagna, you must carefully choose the meat, its crucial ingredient: a combination of beef and pork is ideal. Then you add tomato sauce, bechamel and Parmesan cheese. The pasta should have small holes in it to hold the sauce.
Other versions of lasagna
As already said before, there are many regional versions of the classic recipe of lasagna, whose common ingredients are only meat sauce and Parmesan cheese. In addition to the recipes from Naples and Emilia, the one from Marche, also known as “vincigrassi” (“fat-winning”, in Italian) due to the presence of lard, pepper and semolina instead of pasta, is very popular. There is also a version in Sicily with peas and mozzarella. Whatever the popular and appreciated version is, lasagna is a dish nobody can refuse, even if you suffer from gluten intolerance! The rice or yellow corn lasagna by Le Celizie, bronze-drawn pasta and selected raw ingredients, is the perfect alternative to prepare this historical dish of the Italian cuisine!
