De lasanis (Liber de coquina, 14th century) Period BOrigin theory CVerified

De lasanis is a dish in Liber de coquina ("The Book of Cookery"), a Latin cookery manuscript thought to have been compiled in the circle of the Angevin court at Naples, in southern Italy. A leavened dough is rolled out thin, cut into squares three fingers wide, and boiled in salted water, then layered with grated cheese and spices. It is the oldest surviving recipe for pasta layered with cheese.

The manuscript was published in a critical edition by Marianne Mulon in 1971. Her base text, Latin manuscript 7131 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, is thought to have been written around 1304–1314.

Wheat pasta and cheese, the two leading ingredients, were foods long rooted in the Mediterranean lands. A dish that boiled the one and layered it with the other was set down in a cookbook written for the tables of the court and the well-to-do. In their food history La pasta (2000), Silvano Serventi and Françoise Sabban regard lasagne as the mother form of Europe's sheet pastas.

Guinness World Records, too, presents de lasanis as the first macaroni and cheese, and the dish is often told under the banner of "the world's oldest." Yet lasagne and cheese were going into people's mouths together before this recipe was written.

Salimbene de Adam, a thirteenth-century Italian chronicler, writes in the entry for 1284 of his chronicle about Brother Giovanni of Ravenna, a stout man, and says he never saw anyone eat lasagne with cheese (lagana cum caseo) as gladly as he did. Eating lasagne with cheese was going on by around 1284 at the latest. The chronicle does not say how the lasagne and the cheese came together on the plate, though, so we cannot tell whether it was a layered dish like de lasanis. This record is some twenty years older than the de lasanis manuscript. De lasanis is the oldest surviving set of instructions for making the dish, not the origin of the dish itself.

The title "oldest macaroni and cheese" has another contender as well: the makerouns in The Forme of Cury, the cookbook put together around 1390 by the cooks of King Richard II of England, which some regard as the oldest. De lasanis is about eighty years earlier, but the dating of its manuscript has some range, and lasanis is a sheet pasta, a different line from tube-shaped macaroni. The layering of de lasanis is thought to have been handed on to makerouns, yet which of the two deserves the name of the oldest macaroni and cheese remains unsettled.

Lasagne with cheese was written down by around 1284 as the favorite food of a friar in Ravenna, and the steps for layering the two survived in a Neapolitan manuscript of the early fourteenth century. Neither record says who first layered them, or when.