Real Lasagna

I was trying to remember the last time my family made lasagna from scratch and… I can’t. I’m sure we have… but the only lasagna I can recall is from Costco. I have to admit, Costco does a dang good job. So I imagined that legit Italian lasagna would be like Costco lasagna, but better. Right?

Wrong. Not even close.

Comparing store-bought American lasagna to what we had for dinner last night is like comparing a Twinkie to my mom’s homemade cinnamon rolls drizzled with homemade caramel and chopped nuts. (My friend Brecken still brings those cinnamon rolls up occasionally to this day, and I think the last time he had one was in high school. Mom, please bring one to him the next time you think of it.)

It started with ragù. I assumed ragù was the end goal. I was thrilled to see ragù being made in an authentic Italian home kitchen! We chopped up carrots and onions into fine bits (you can also add celery if you like), and let that caramelize in a generous bath of olive oil. Then we added the meat and let it brown just barely before pouring in some red wine.

After adding concentrated tomato paste and three cans of tomato sauce, we turned down the heat and let it simmer.

The most important ingredient for ragù is time. Hours. That magic pot was simmering on the stove all afternoon. It filled the kitchen and whole house with a warm, delicious scent.

For dinner that night we enjoyed pasta with ragù, and it was fantastic. Tomato was the shining star on that plate, its flavor was incredible.

I couldn’t help but noticed that most of the ragù was still in the pot afterward. Why did we make so much more than we needed?

The answer came a couple of days later when Maria arrived home with biodegradable grocery sacks in her arms. (That’s right, they don’t do plastic bags here. It’s either a biodegradable sack or paper bags.) Among the groceries were a couple of packages of fresh lasagna pasta sheets, the kind you keep in the fridge.

The whole family eagerly awaited lasagna, a meal usually reserved for special occasions in the fall or Christmas. It’s a comfort food. Thankfully and perfectly, the day we made lasagna was the first day it rained since I got here. The weather was cool, the sky was dark, and the mood was set for savoring lasagna.

Emma insisted on helping Maria layer the ragù, pasta sheets, and grana. They call grated Parmesan “grana.” Cheese here is very serious business. They don’t buy cheese already shredded. When I explained that at home we buy a big bag of shredded mozzarella to sprinkle on pizza, they were skeptical. “How do you know that stuff is mozzarella? It could be a bag of shredded garbage.” I’m sure they would shudder to see the plastic jar of dry, grated Parmesan we keep in the back of our fridge.

Layer after layer they stacked the pasta, ragù, and grana. I lost count of the layers but it was more than nine! The pasta sheets were very thin and delicate, more like croissant layers.

The outcome was mind blowing. Each delicate layer of pasta melted under my fork like butter. The ragù flavor and grana all came together to form a masterpiece.

Their dialect word for lasagna is “pasticcio.” It translates to a casserole or a mess. I prefer how Pietro described the meaning of pasticcio to me. He said, “If I take five different colors of crayons and scribble all over like this,” drawing wildly on the invisible piece of paper in the air in front of him, “that would be a pasticcio.”

Lasagna is a mess of sorts because there are so many ingredients that are thrown together in a pan. You could call it a mess, or you could call it an art. If it’s a mess, then a glorious mess it is.