Lasagne, the pasta that was never about the sauce

Layers of fresh pasta, spinach, and lemon-scented chicken, baked white without a drop of tomato. Our dish of the week at MyCaffé, this week only.

Here is something most people don’t know about lasagne: the word never described the food. It comes from the Latin lasanum, a cooking pot, by way of the Greek laganon, a flat sheet of dough. The dish was named after the vessel it baked in, not the meat or the cheese or the sauce. Which means lasagne has been, from the very beginning, a pasta defined by a single act: layering, then the oven. Everything in between was always up for grabs. (In Italy the word even stays plural, lasagne, because the dish is the sheets, and there was never just one.)

So when we tell you this week’s lasagne is made with chicken and lemon and not a trace of tomato, we’re not breaking the rules. We’re using the only one that ever mattered.

We told you about the girasoli, the pasta that turns its face to the sun. This is its companion on the menu this week, reaching for the same light from a different direction: through a lemon. The chicken is roasted and torn by hand, and it carries the lemon the way a kitchen does, as a scent worked through it rather than a wedge on the side: profumo di limone, more perfume than juice. It is the brightness of a southern Italian summer folded into a dish that usually belongs to the cold months.

Because this is lasagne in bianco. White, with no tomato anywhere near it. Pale sheets of fresh egg pasta layered with creamed spinach and that roasted chicken, sweet cloves of slow-roasted garlic tucked through, baked until the spinach at the edges catches and crisps. It comes to the table under a drizzle of béchamel and a snow of grated parmesan. It is far lighter than the Sunday lasagne you are picturing, the red monument that sits in your chest all afternoon. This one you can eat at lunch and still walk back out into the sun.

The spinach is not decoration. In Bologna, the true home of lasagne al forno, the pasta itself is traditionally green, lasagne verdi, the dough kneaded with spinach until it takes on the colour of early summer. We keep the spinach in the layers rather than the sheets, but the instinct is the same and the lineage is long. Green has belonged in this dish for centuries.

There is a reason lasagne tastes like someone’s kitchen and not a factory. You can’t rush it and you can’t fake it. Someone has to cook the chicken, make the béchamel, and build the layers by hand before the oven does the slow part. That patience is most of the flavour, and it is close to how the whole day runs here.

A day at MyCaffé has a shape to it. It begins early and unhurried, a cappuccino and the first croissant while the Belval morning is still cool. By midday the sun has come round to the terrace, and this is the hour the lasagne was made for: lunch in the light, a square of it on the plate, an espresso once the plate is clear, no real reason to get up. Bring someone; it is a dish that improves with company. From Wednesday to Friday the day carries on after the work does, easing into MyAperitivo as the sun drops, a glass in hand and small things to share. The lasagne is the middle of all that. Come for it at lunch, and you will want to stay for the rest.

It is the dish of the week, and that means what it says. The lasagne is here until Saturday, since we close on Sundays, and next week the menu turns and it is gone. The sun, with any luck, will still be around. The lasagne will not.