National Lasagna Day is celebrated on July 28th of each year. The staff at National Whatever Day were unable to discover the origin on National Lasagna Day.
Lasagne, U.S. spelling lasagna, is a wide and flat type of pasta and possibly one of the oldest shapes. The word also refers to a dish made with this type of pasta. As with most other types of pasta, the word is a plural form, lasagne meaning more than one piece of lasagna ribbon. Traditionally, the dough was prepared in Southern Italy with semolina and water and in the northern regions, where semolina was not available, with flour and eggs. Today in Italy, since the only type of wheat allowed for pasta is durum wheat, lasagne are made of semolina (from durum wheat) and eggs.
Origin of Lasagne
There are three theories on the origin of lasagne, two of which denote an ancient Greek dish. The main theory is that lasagne 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.
Another theory is that the word lasagne 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 lasagne is made. Later the name of the food took on the name of the serving dish.
A third theory proposed 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 has similarities to modern lasagne in both its recipe, which features a layering of ingredients between pasta sheets, and its name. However, an important difference is the lack of tomatoes, which 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.