This is medieval lasagne, without a tomato-based sauce.

This recipe is from Forme of Cury, my favourite medieval cookbook.

“Take gode broth and do in an erthen pot, take flour of payndemayn and make þerof past with water. and make þerof thynne foyles as paper with a roller, drye it harde and seeþ it in broth take Chese ruayn grated and lay it in disshes with powdour douce. and lay þeron loseyns isode as hoole as þou mizt and above powdour and chese, and so twyse or thryse, & serue it forth.”

Or my transcription:

“Take good broth and simmer in an earthern pot, take white flour and make a paste with water, and make thereof thin foils as [thin as] paper with a roller, dry it hard and boil it in the broth. Take grated soft cheese and lay it in dishes with sweet powders, and lay on it boiled lozenges as whole [or trimmed] as you wish, and above powder and cheese, and to twice or thrice, and serve it forth.”

You might be surprised to see a lasagne recipe in a 14th century recipe collection. King Richard II brought cooks from across Europe, and cuisine at that time was more consistent than you might expect.

One issue here is “chese ruayn”, which also occurs in a cheesecake recipe, where it reads to be something like ricotta. However, you must grate it in this recipe. A 14th century grater was otherwise used to grate bread into breadcrumbs, and probably didn’t look like a modern grater. It might even have been a literal grate made by a blacksmith, or perhaps a sheet of metal with holes punched into it.

Modern pastry enthusiasts grate butter for the best pastry, so don’t assume you can’t grate soft cheeses. In the Australian climate, it’s easiest if you put them in the freezer for an hour before grating.

Sweet powders tend to be something like castor sugar, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg.

Because the recipe specifies dried noodles, I have always gone with commercial lasagne sheets, in which case you can do up a whole baking dish of it, and cut into lozenges (diamond shapes) when done. Lozenges were heraldic diamond shapes, but the recipe is not particularly clear about the end shape, as you can trim them into a shape if you wish.

(A purist might make the noodles, and roll out with a rolling-pin. There’s no way I could scale that up for a feast, so I won’t.)

There is a later Italian version of this recipe which uses leavened dough, and specifies that the lozenges are to be cut into squares three fingers-breadth on a side. That one uses more savoury spices including pepper. While all those things are an interesting variant, the fact that Forme of Cury dries the noodles first suggests that it’s not leavened.

The Italian recipe gives us a suggestion for size: say 50mm x 50mm. We might go a little smaller for a feast with lots of dishes.

With our first attempt at this in Torlyon, we thickened the broth with rice flour after boiling the noodles (not in an earthern pot alas), and mixed that with the cheese and spices. Otherwise, what’s the point of the broth, you could just use water. It ended up a bit slippery, and we wouldn’t do that again.

We tried it in Okewaite, as a meat sauce with gravy, and were still underwhelmed.

Looking at it again, I don’t think it went into an oven in the 14th century — there was scope to put tarts in once the bread had finished, and they had course “trap” ceramic pie dishes, but no practical way to do a tray of lasagne. I think this was assembled cold, and on reflection I think it was intended as a sweet dish: a cheesecake lasagne. The stock might be a red herring: you always had a boiling stock pot, so cooking the noodles in it was convenient and the starch might thicken the broth a little. Maybe it might make the dish a little ‘richer’ than mere salted water.

For an experiment, I used one 250g packet of Aldi lasagne noodles, which has six sheets in a packet. I tried Aldi cream cheese and Aldi L’Ovale cheese (something like a rinded brie) — the cream cheese grated to a point, the L’Ovale didn’t.

For sweet powder, I used brown sugar for a contrasting colour, 1 tsp cinnamon, half tsp ginger.

I boiled the noodles with a vegetarian stock cube, in a nod to the recipe without excluding most vegetarians.

For fun, I did them in some glass bowls, thinking that you could see the layers from the side. I do have enough of these bowls for a big feast.

I found that the “grated” cream cheese didn’t settle into a tidy layer, and neither did the sugar mix particularly. Only two layers would fit in the bowl with good grace.

The testers were Alys and Ross/Ragnar. The noodles were cooked to normal eating, but needed to be really soft. The taste was good, but too rich in that quantity.

We discussed the recipe and decided that it doesn’t preclude mixing the spice mix through the cheese, in which case it would pack into better layers. The noodles are then structural. I think we’re back to making it in trays and cutting into diamond shapes for serving, for a big feast.