Lasagne in Early 20th Century Italo-Argentinian Cuisine

Italian Cuisine, as we know it today, was the creation of Italians who lived and migrated between three places in the early 20th century: Italy, the United States and Argentina.  26 million Italians moved overseas between 1870 and 1970, to northern Europe, the US, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and elsewhere.  New York and Buenos Aires both were home to more Italians than any city in Italy itself.  And there was constant back and forth between these places.

And it was a time when the cuisine was in great flux.  New dried pasta. New canned tomatoes. Political upheavals in Italy. No reason to assume the cuisine followed the rules that we read today in Italian cookbooks.

So when I had a request from a reader in San Francisco who wanted to make lasagne like his mother made it using the early 20th century Argentinian cookbook, Doña Lola’s El Arte de la Mesa, it seemed a good moment to revisit the Italian cuisine of Buenos Aires briefly.

It’s not the first time I’ve talked about Italian cuisine in Argentina, nor about the varieties of pasta and pizza in Buenos Aires.  Doña Lola’s El arte de la mesa has a murky publishing history but one of my commentators told me the 6th edition was published in 1955, so the first was probably no later than the early 1940s.

There’s only one recipe for lasagne in this thousand-page book.  It occurs in the relatively short section on Pastas and Arroz, about 20 pages.   Rice gets 20 recipes, canelones 5, fideos (a broad category, roughly spaghetti) 5, macarrones 5, noquis (still a favorite in Argentina) 10, polenta 5, raviolis 10, tallarines (broader noodles) 9, and a miscellany of others.

So here’s the recipe for “lasagnas”.  In the original quantities are on the left, instructions on the right.  This is for 6 portions and the preparation and cooking time are listed as 45 minutes. Doña Lola moved fast than I do.

1/2 kilo flour

2 eggs

1/2 cup of salmuero (brine)

tuco (tomato sauce) to cook the albondigas (meat balls)

200 g of chopped meat

1 slice of bread

4 spoons of milk

1 egg

1 yolk

1/2 cup flour

1 cup grated cheese

First you make the dough with flour, eggs, and brine and you let it rest, ending up like a dough for raviolis.

On the side you prepare the sauce and in this sauce you cook some very tiny albondigas which you make with meat, salt, bread soaked in milk and well broken up and squeezed out, egg and yolk.  You make them the size of a nuez (probably walnut here) rolling them in flour and you put them to cook in the sauce over a slow fire.

You estirar (stretch, roll) the dough out finely, you cut redondeles (big rounds) or squares and you cook them in boiling water and salt. Once they are cooked you drain them carefully so as not to break them, you pass them through cold water, and you dry them on a linen, and you place them in a fuente) dish in camadas (layers) filling them like alfajor (roughly pastries with sweet fillings) with the suace in the middle and dusting them with cheese.  You continue until you finish, you should serve it really hot.

I’ve no idea if this is anything like my reader’s mother’s lasagne.   But the result must be layers of pasta with small meat balls, tomato sauce, and some cheese, we know not what.  I assume the pasta was cut to fit the shape of the dish.  It is less cheesy or creamy than we are used to.  And the fact that the author compares it to alfajores suggests that it was not that common at the time.

And many of the other recipes for pasta in the book are in fact what Americans might call casseroles: layered dishes of pasta, meat and sauce of some kind.  Was this common in Italy at the time?  In the US?  Comments?

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