Newsletter # 54 – Lasagne with Chicken and Ham

Today’s recipe once again looks at lasagne. Last year it was traditional beef lasagne which required both a meat sauce and a Mornay sauce made from scratch. Chicken and ham lasagne requires less preparation, and it is a good way of using up leftovers. It’s also very tasty. But first I thought we might briefly study the history of lasagne.

When I was very young it was generally thought that the merchant and adventurer, Marco Polo, introduced pasta to Europe in and around the late 13^th century after he had spent many years in Asia. In truth this is a myth based on a North American advertising campaign in the 1930’s aimed at selling more spaghetti. Pasta in Europe can be traced back well over 1000 years before Marco Polo when it was commonplace in Etruscan society. Being fried and consumed as a snack, pasta was vastly different to the hundreds of varieties that we enjoy today.

The wheat of choice for pasta today in Italy is Durum, which was introduced to Italy in the 9^th century. The term lasagne was first used in the 13^th century but again the dish, prepared in the fashion that we are now accustomed to was many centuries later, considering tomatoes weren’t introduced to Europe until well into the 1500’s.

So, in Australia the term lasagne can mean the cooked dish which we would make for a family meal or perhaps when you are taking a plate as in ‘I’ll bring a lasagne’, when it actually means the flat, wide sheets of pasta that were perfected in Italy. Based on that, you would need to qualify what flavour your lasagne was – seafood, vegetarian or perhaps an authentic recipe from regional Italy.