This Old-School Lasagna Dish Is Now A Rarity In Most Kitchens

There are various ingredients you should be using in your lasagna, but one that probably isn't on your shopping list is potato. Once upon a time, though, lasagna creations featuring potatoes as the star ingredient were common — though the dish has now become obscure.

Today, we know the rich Italian dish that is lasagna as a layered concoction, generally featuring sheets of pasta, ground meat, zesty tomato sauce, creamy dairy elements, and plenty of melty cheese. There are variations that deviate from this formula, like meatless vegetable lasagna; recipes using alternative proteins, like roast chicken and grilled eggplant lasagna; and there are even dessert lasagna recipes floating around out there as well as renditions hailing from outside Italy, like Mexican lasagna, which layers up Tex-Mex elements using tortillas instead of noodles. In its most commonly known form, though, lasagna builds on that classic, layered combination of pasta, meat, sauce, and dairy.

During World War II, though, lasagna looked very different in the kitchens of Italian housewives, who were struggling to feed their families in the face of war-caused food shortages. Ingenuity give birth to a dish called lasagne di patate (Italian for "potato lasagna"), which made up for the scarcity of ingredients like flour and meat. Instead of wheat-based flour, the pasta sheets were crafted from potatoes and breadcrumbs, and rather than sausage or ground beef, vegetables were used in the sauce. The result certainly didn't approximate anything like a traditional lasagna, but it nonetheless created a filling dish that fed the family and made use of what was available.

Making lasagne di patate was no longer necessary after war rationing and shortages ended, which likely contributed to the dish fading from popularity. Potato lasagna has reportedly been experiencing somewhat of a renaissance, though, with the dish showing up on restaurant menus here and there as the old recipes are discovered by new gourmands.

Modern recipes for lasagne di patate seem less like a lasagna, though, and closer to potatoes au gratin, which is a French dish, not Italian. Many Americans became familiar with au gratin potatoes, or gratin dauphinois, courtesy of the French Chef herself, Julia Child, who used only four ingredients to craft the dish: potatoes, milk, garlic, and butter, along with salt and pepper for seasoning. Unlike Child's prescription for the dish, though, most au gratin recipes include a generous portion of cheese, making them very like today's lasagne di patate recipes, minus the meat element commonly found in potato lasagna.

Modern potato lasagnas largely layer up potatoes, ham, cheese, and bechamel sauce, rather than tomato sauce, though a small number do still incorporate tomato elements along with the bechamel. This is more appropriate than one might think, as most Italian lasagnas utilize bechamel and not ricotta cheese — ricotta is not traditionally used in Italian lasagna but was largely an innovation of Italian-American immigrants.