/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>Food researchers yesterday made the extraordinary discovery that lasagne - the quintessentially 'Italian' pasta dish - is, in fact, an English invention.

>The 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.

>Culinary 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.

>The term for the dish most likely comes from the Greek word lasana, meaning pot (an alternate theory is that it comes from the Greek word laganon, meaning flat pasta dough cut into strips). The Romans adopted the word and began referring to the pot that lasagna is served in as lasanum, and eventually, that term became used for the dish itself.

Remember lads, the next time you talk shit about and badmouth British food whilst shovelling untold amounts of mac 'n cheese and loseyns into your mouth you are in fact a hypocrite. English food surprises me at every turn. It's an esoteric cuisine.