Lasagna Day

What the day is

Lasagna Day is observed on July 29. The dish is flat sheets of pasta layered with sauce, cheese and usually meat, baked until the top browns and the layers set enough to cut.

The word is older than the dish. Lasagna descends through Latin from a Greek term for a flat sheet of dough, and originally referred to the pasta shape rather than the assembled bake.

Origin and background

The definitive Italian version is Bolognese: lasagne alla bolognese, made with green pasta colored with spinach, a slow-cooked ragu, bechamel sauce and Parmigiano Reggiano. There is no ricotta in it, and the bechamel is what makes the layers creamy.

Southern Italy answers differently. Neapolitan lasagna, traditionally a carnival dish, uses ricotta, small meatballs, sausage and hard-boiled egg, and is considerably heavier.

The Italian-American standard descends mainly from the southern version, which is why most Americans regard ricotta as essential and bechamel as an affectation, while most northern Italians regard the reverse. Both are legitimate; they are simply different dishes with the same name.

The structural problem is the same either way. A lasagna is a stack of wet layers, and if the sauce is too loose or the ricotta too wet, the whole thing slumps into soup on the plate. Everything worth knowing about making it concerns managing moisture.

How to take part

• Reduce the sauce further than seems necessary. It will release more liquid in the oven, not less.
• Drain ricotta if you use it, and bind it with egg, which sets during baking and holds the layer together.
• Use no-boil sheets only with a genuinely wet sauce; they take their water from somewhere.
• Do not overfill. Four or five thin layers beat three thick ones, and the top layer should be sauce and cheese, never bare pasta.
• Rest it at least twenty minutes out of the oven before cutting. This is the single step most people skip and the reason slices collapse.
• Make it a day ahead. Lasagna is better reheated, which is rare among baked dishes.