What Roman cookbook describes a lasagna-like dish called lasana or lasanum?

The story behind the answer

What Roman cookbook describes a lasagna-like dish called lasana or lasanum? The answer is De re coquinaria.

De re coquinaria, also known as Apicius, is the surviving Roman collection of cookery recipes that describes a lasagna-like preparation using the terms lasana or lasanum. The Latin words may refer to a cooking vessel or container as well as to the food associated with it, so the passage is evidence for an ancient relative or linguistic ancestor—not a modern lasagna recipe in the strict sense.

The work is a compilation rather than a straightforward cookbook written and published by one known author. Its surviving form may have been assembled or edited over centuries, with material associated with Roman culinary traditions from the Imperial period and a manuscript tradition that continued into late antiquity and the Middle Ages.

The other choices belong to later medieval European culinary history. Liber de Coquina contains one of the earliest recorded recipes resembling medieval lasagna, while Le Viandier and The Forme of Cury are later French and English traditions. None is the Roman text linked to lasana or lasanum.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Sept. 2026

Add question to a list

Choose a list to keep this question in: