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

De lasanis appears in Liber de coquina, a Latin cookery manuscript compiled in the Angevin circle of Naples, in southern Italy. Sheets of wheat pasta are cut into squares, boiled, and layered with grated cheese. It leads straight to today's lasagne: a layered cheese-pasta.

The base manuscript (Paris, BnF lat.7131) is dated to roughly 1304-1314, against the background of the Neapolitan Angevin table of the late 13th and early 14th centuries. The method itself is not hard. Roll out wheat dough, cut it, lay on cheese, and build it up in layers. The main pasta and the cheese were both long-established ingredients of the Mediterranean world, kept on hand in any Neapolitan kitchen.

And this plain dish was set down in a manuscript of the court and the well-to-do. Because it was recorded in writing rather than left to oral tradition, its steps survive intact more than seven hundred years later. De lasanis carries the weight it does in food history precisely because it is the oldest surviving set of instructions telling us how to make a layered cheese-pasta. The food historians Silvano Serventi and Francoise Sabban, in La pasta (2000), place this lasagne type as the mother form of European sheet pasta.

De lasanis was once handed the Guinness World Record title of "oldest macaroni and cheese," and that headline tends to run ahead on its own. But line up the sources and the story grows more tangled.

First, de lasanis is not the oldest dish. The food itself, lasagne topped with cheese, was already being eaten before this recipe. The 13th-century chronicler Salimbene de Adam, in his Cronica (c.1284), tells of a monk devouring lasagna con formaggio (lasagne with cheese). This is the earliest documentary appearance of the dish type, about twenty years ahead of the recipe. So de lasanis is the first document to record how the dish was made, not the origin of the dish itself.

Second, the very title "oldest macaroni and cheese" has a rival claim. In the English-speaking world, many hold up the makerouns of the 1390 English royal cookbook The Forme of Cury as the oldest. De lasanis is about eighty years earlier, but its lasanis is sheet pasta, a separate line from tubular "macaroni." So which one deserves to be called the oldest "macaroni and cheese" is still unsettled. The line from de lasanis to makerouns can be traced, but the contest for oldest is left open here on purpose.

The dating of this dish once leaned on Guinness and Wikipedia. Now Marianne Mulon's critical edition of Liber de coquina (1968) fixes the manuscript at c.1304-1314, and Salimbene's chronicle places the documentary first appearance of the dish type at 1284. The "world's oldest" headline stays in reserve, and what remains as firm ground is the single point that the oldest surviving set of instructions existed in early-14th-century Naples.