The hill I will die on: Nobody just ‘rustles up’ a lasagne

We need to give up this pretence of effortlessness and start calling the dish what it is: a laborious meat-and-cheese architecture project

What is this “rustling up a lasagne” thing – apart from a straightforward contradiction? Nobody ever says they’re rustling up a shepherd’s pie, or a moussaka, or a three-layered chocolate cake. But a lasagne? Sure thing.

I have a clear memory of the moment when, only recently out of our student years, a friend first pulled this misrepresentation out of her hungover hat. It was the day after a party, with a big clear-up under way and an agreed need for carbs. There was exhaustion, there were bin liners in hands, but she was busy “rustling”. And then, a mere few hours of laborious cooking and construction later, there it was on the table: the absolutely standard lasagne, in its “oh this old thing” white baking dish.

Decades later, the sheet-pasta extravaganza retains its reputation as an effortless standby, despite involving multiple components, careful assembly and a baking time long enough to watch a Netflix episode. You could be at the office picnic, an “everyone bring a course” dinner, even a wake, and people will casually announce they’ve made a lasagne as if they’ve decided to boil an egg, not committed hours to a meat-and-cheese architecture project.

“It’s no bother,” they add. “You can even buy the ready-made pasta sheets and do the cheat’s version. You don’t have to make it from scratch.” The relief. You’re still building the house, but someone’s delivered some bricks.

Few things make me more aware of my half-Danish heritage than the British talking about lasagne as if it’s the culinary equivalent of putting the kettle on. There’s an admiration, it seems, for effort without the appearance of having made any. I’ve neither mastered nor ever related to this.

Lasagne is the perfect food for this contradiction. It looks generous and impressive without seeming pretentious. It can be made in advance, which allows the cook to present the evening as wonderfully relaxed. By serving time the subtext is: “This? Just a lasagne.” No. You browned meat, chopped vegetables, made two sauces (we’re talking sauce on sauce), assembled six strata of carbohydrates and dairy and monopolised the oven.

There’s a generational angle, too. For anyone who learned to cook in the 1980s and 90s, lasagne was a “proper homemade meal” – you absorbed the idea that producing one was what competent adults did when guests came round.

Online searches tell me the first mention of “lasagne” was in 13th-century Italy, and that the word’s origins are ancient Greek or Latin, depending on the source. (A little more filtering brings up recipes for “next-level lasagne”: a new tautology for a dish that is by definition entirely levels.) But the cultural roots of the “effortless” myth is surely British.

The true miracle of lasagne isn’t the layering. It’s that we’ve spent decades persuading ourselves that a dish requiring project management, structural engineering and a cooling-off period counts as something you’ve “just knocked together”.

Build it and they will come. But don’t say there is no building involved.

Keren Levy is a London-based freelance writer. She has been published in The Guardian, the Spectator and on BBC Worklife.