The Only Lasagne Recipe You'll Ever Need (An Odyssey)

The Story

It began, as most things in my kitchen do, with grief disguised as hunger. Robert and I had been married for six years when I first layered this particular ragù, and I want to be honest with you here, in this space, because that is the kind of writer I am: honesty first, recipe fourteenth.

We had just moved into a house with a gas stove that hissed like it disapproved of us. I made the lasagne on a Tuesday. Robert cried at the table. Not from the onions — I hadn't gotten to the onions yet. He cried because, he said, it tasted like a version of me he hadn't met before. I took this as a compliment. In retrospect, I'm no longer sure it was one.

We separated eleven months later. I kept the recipe. He kept the dog. I think about this trade often, usually while the béchamel is thickening, which — don't worry — we'll get to.

On The Word "Lasagne"

The word lasagne derives from the Ancient Greek lasanon — meaning, roughly, "chamber pot." Sit with that. Sit with it the way the pasta sits with the sauce: patiently, and forever changed.

Scholars disagree on precisely how a cooking vessel became a beloved family dinner, but I like to think it's a story about transformation. Or possibly plumbing. Etymology is like that sometimes.

A Brief History (600 words)

Some say pasta was invented by Marco Polo, who brought it back from China in the 13th century like a very carb-forward souvenir. Those people are wrong, and I have devoted an embarrassing portion of my adult life to correcting them at dinner parties, which may explain the dog situation from earlier.

Pasta appears in Italian texts predating Polo's travels by at least a century. But facts have never stopped a good origin myth, and frankly, neither has anyone's patience for the rest of what I'm about to tell you about durum wheat.

[Section continues for several hundred more words about durum wheat, medieval trade routes, and a tangent involving my grandmother's opinions on store-bought pasta sheets, which she considered, in her words, "a moral failing." Content abbreviated here so you don't have to suffer the way I did writing it.]

A Necessary Digression on Freezing Leftovers

People ask me constantly whether this lasagne freezes well, and I want to honor that question with the seriousness it deserves, which is to say: several paragraphs. Freezing is, at its core, an act of faith — you are trusting a version of yourself three weeks from now to want what you want tonight, which, frankly, Robert never did, and look how that turned out.

Wrap it tightly. Label it with the date, though I never do, preferring instead to open the freezer like a small archaeological dig, unsure whether I'm about to unearth dinner or 2019. Thaw overnight. Do not, under any circumstances, thaw it the way Giancarlo once thawed a duck, a story I am contractually unable to tell you here but have told at every dinner party since.

Almost. First, my thoughts on the moon, and how it, too, waxes and wanes the way a good ragù does over three hours of simmering. I won't elaborate further. I already have, several times, in the newsletter you haven't subscribed to yet.

Also — quickly — a word about my cousin's wedding, which had nothing to do with lasagne and everything to do with grief, timing, and a caterer named Dennis. I promise this is relevant. It is not relevant. We're almost there.

Dennis, if you must know, served a lasagne at that wedding. A store-bought one. My grandmother — the store-bought-pasta-as-moral-failing grandmother, you'll recall — did not attend, having passed some years prior, but I felt her disappointment move through the reception hall like a draft. I have spent the intervening decade trying to cook my way back into her good opinion, which is difficult, on account of the aforementioned death. This recipe is the closest I've come. I'm telling you this not because it will help you make the lasagne — it will not — but because you clicked a button that said "Jump to Recipe," and I feel you should understand the kind of person who builds a button like that and then routes it here instead. We are, and I cannot stress this enough, almost there.