Lasagna Recipe

After a hard day's jousting, what a medieval English knight needed was . . . a plate of lasagna.

And he apparently could have it, according to British researchers who claim to have found a British recipe for lasagna dating from the 14th century, long before Italian chefs came up with the concoction of layers of pasta topped with cheese.

"This is the first recorded recipe for a lasagna-based dish," David Crompton, one of the researchers, said yesterday.

"The Italian dish has tomatoes, which were only discovered two centuries later in the New World."

Other food historians have suggested the dish has a very ancient history, and Mr. Crompton didn't claim that the English invented lasagna.

But others who are organizing a medieval festival to be held at Berkeley Castle in southern England later this month found the recipe in The Forme of Cury at the British Museum, commissioned by King Richard II in 1390 and regarded as one of the world's oldest recipe books.

"We prepared the medieval lasagna yesterday . . . and it was delicious, although strangely sweet and spicy," Mr. Crompton said. Among its ingredients are cinnamon and saffron, not usually found in the Italian version.

To create loseyns (pronounced "lasan"), The Forme of Cury advises the cook to make a paste from flour of "paynedemayn" -- a substance that hasn't been identified -- roll it thin and cook it with grated cheese and sweet powder. The Italians are having none of it.

"Whatever this old dish was called, it was not lasagna as we make it," an Italian embassy spokesman said.

To create loseyns (pronounced lasan), The Forme of Cury advises the cook to make a paste from flour of "panedemayn," a substance that hasn't been identified; roll it thin and cook it with grated cheese and sweet powder.

Predictably, the Italians are having none of it. "Whatever this old dish was called, it was not lasagna as we make it," The Daily Telegraph quoted an Italian Embassy spokesman as saying.

The recipe in full, as written:

"Take good broth and do in an earthen pot. Take flour of paynedemayn and make erof past with water and make erof thynne foyles as paper with a roller; drye it harde and see it in broth."

Next, "take cheese ruayn grated and lay it in dishes with powder douce and lay eron loseyns isode as hoole as you might and above powdour and cheese; and so twice or thrice & serue it forth."