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Written by
Gregory Lewis McNamee
Fact-checked by
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
lasagna, pasta dish of Italian origin, made with broad often ruffled noodles and a tomato or white sauce.
Lasagna, in the singular, is a southern Italian variation of what northern Italians call lasagne, in the plural. The name is believed to come from a Latin word for cooking pot, lasanum, though some etymologies trace it to the Greek flatbread called laganon, known in Italy since at least the time of Augustus Caesar (63 bce−14 ce). Lasagna in its modern form, made of a meat sauce much like ragù Bolognese that is layered with noodles and béchamel (besciamella or balsamella) sauce, is believed to have originated in the province of Emilia-Romagna. Variations abound throughout Italy: the lasagna served in Naples, for example, usually contains small meatballs, ricotta and mozzarella cheeses, and sliced hard-boiled eggs, while that served in Genoa uses pesto as its sauce. Some recipes use sausage as well as other types of ground meat; others incorporate mushrooms into the ragù.
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American lasagna—the southern term is generally used, since most Italian Americans trace their origins to southern Italy—tends to follow the Neapolitan template, but with many variations. A vegetarian version, for example, will replace meat with spinach and sometimes other vegetables such as peppers and squash. Noodles known in Italy as lasagne verdi are made with spinach as an ingredient.
Making lasagna is a more labour-intensive process than that required of most other pastas. The lasagna noodles are cooked al dente (firm but not hard) and then drained and cooled, so they can be handled. In an ovenproof dish, a layer of tomato sauce is spooned in and then overlaid lengthwise by a layer of overlapping noodles. To this are added layers of meat sauce, cheese, béchamel, or other ingredients, overlaid by another layer of noodles, and repeated. Italian chefs hold that a lasagna must have a minimum of three layers of noodles, though four layers are more common. The assembled lasagna is then baked at 350 °F (180 °C) for about half an hour. In order to keep the lasagna moist as it cooks, most chefs place a covering of aluminum foil over the dish.
Lasagna is considered one of the oldest pasta dishes in Italian cuisine, attested to in medieval literature soon after Marco Polo returned from his travels in Asia. Polo himself recounts eating a dish in China that he called lasagne, noting that the flour used for the noodles was from breadfruit.
