The Italians say it's a load of baloney. But food researchers yesterday made the extraordinary claim that lasagne - the quintessentially Italian pasta dish - is, in fact, an English invention.
A recipe for the dish appears in one of the oldest known cookery books, The Forme of Cury, compiled by a group of chefs on behalf of King Richard II in around 1390.
Culinary experts made the discovery while researching authentic medieval dishes to serve at the Joust festival at Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire, next week.
They say it is evidence that the Italians pinched the English version and made it their own.
Festival spokesman Maurice Bacon said: 'Very few people know lasagne was created in England and I defy anyone to disprove it because it appeared in one of the first cookery books ever written - under the name loseyns.
'Tomatoes were not used in cooking until a long time after the recipe was invented, so the Italians merely modified the English recipe and even called it by a similar name.
'Loseyns died out in England, probably when potatoes were discovered and replaced pasta as the staple diet here.
'As pasta gradually returned to these shores, everyone assumed that lasagne had to be from Italy.'
But Italians are not prepared to give up one of their favourite national dishes without a fight.
TV chef Valentina Harris said: 'I've never heard of lasagne being from anywhere but Italy.
'It is considered a very special dish in Italy, served at banquets and weddings. Maybe at some point King Richard or someone from his court visited Italy and picked up the idea.
'I think it's very unlikely that the English invented it.'
A spokesman at the Italian Embassy in London said: 'Lasagne is English? Never.
'Whatever this old dish was called it was not lasagne as we make it -
and I bet it didn't taste as good.'
Historians are uncertain about the precise origins of lasagne, which is made from flat sheets of pasta.
According to the Oxford Companion to Food, the ancient Greeks had a dish called laganon, which was a non-pasta flat cake, from which modern lasagne may have developed. The Romans cut pasta into ribbons and called it lagana.
Something which could be called lasagne in the modern sense had appeared in Italy by the 13th century.
The earliest recipe book in the Western world is the fourth-century De Re Coquinaria by Apicius, which contains about 500 Roman recipes, including lagana.
The King's recipe book is the first to be written in English.