Comfort Food: My Life With Lasagna

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I am looking for the perfect lasagna, making my way through cookbooks at midnight, ready for heartbreak but hopeful, like Dante seeking Beatrice.

I have been making lasagna for 30 years. I am middle-aged and in love and I am counting on lasagna. Marcella Hazan strongly recommends passion, clarity and sincerity when cooking, and she particularly recommends it in the form of Le Lasagne coi Funghi e Prosciutto, and I am considering it. Six layers of pasta, bechamel sauce, thinly sliced wild and cultivated mushrooms, prosciutto, and freshly grated Parmesan. I have made it before. It is handsomely reliable. It is a good black dress with pearls. When I read the recipe at half past midnight, I think, No one, not even a man whose mother is a very fine Italian cook, and actually an Italian, could say that you had not made an effort when you take this out of the oven. I wonder if I can bring myself to refer to it as le lasagne.

My life with lasagna began when I was cutting classes at Boston University. I wandered across town, into the North End, and discovered real Italian food. Sweet and hot sausage hanging in ropes, polpette taken out of a steaming pot and dropped into a paper bucket for me, fresh ricotta in a tub, boncini of fresh mozzarella bobbing in a steel drum, Parmesan in giant wheels, and red peppers roasting over a hibachi while I watched. No one thought I should be studying Heidegger instead. No one thought I should turn down a single taste of anything. I stayed so long, a woman offered me a drink, and I had my first shot of grappa in a paper cup, at dusk on Salem Street. It seemed that the only right thing to do was to buy everything I could and layer it between sheets of pasta. I cooked all night. (It would not take all night if you did it. I had one frying pan and one stockpot.) I invited everyone I knew to come for dinner, and I told each person to bring a bottle of red wine. I was 18 years old. I had successfully fed 20 people. I had surpassed my mother. I had fallen in love with the entire country of Italy, and when everyone else had gone home, there was a handsome point guard washing my dishes. It was a culinary and social success of such magnitude that I thought, There is no reason to ever make anything else.

I finished college, still making the Tutti con tutti lasagna. My new husband said he had never eaten anything like it. He was from Minnesota, and he meant it.

I had my first little girl, and when I was trying to work things out with the mothers in her play group, I made “dieter's lasagna.” It had ground turkey breast, whole-wheat noodles, part-skim mozzarella, and fat-free ricotta. One of the other mothers said, "I feel better about myself when I eat this way, don't you?" I did not. I felt that I had betrayed all of ltaly. We left the lasagna and the educationally stimulating toys, and I drove my daughter all the way to Pepe's Pizza in New Haven, Conn. We finished off a small pie, and when we got home I washed the tomato sauce out of her hair, which I expected, but also out of her underwear, which I think must be the sign that you have really, really enjoyed your lunch.

Tempus fugit, and I had three kids and made the World's Fastest Lasagna about once a week. I bought my pesto sauce. I bought my tomato sauce. I bought no-boil noodles (completely fine), and I grated Fontina cheese on every layer. I tossed chunks of Fontina to my children while the WFL baked, and they clapped like seals, and we agreed that there was nothing wrong with any food that could be caught on the first bounce.

My husband liked to entertain. When I met him, he ate bulgur wheat and lentil casseroles and drank wine out of bottles shaped like fish. By the time we divorced, we had 400 traditionally shaped bottles in the basement. Now it’s 2 a.m., and I am thinking of a Barolo we both liked. I wonder if it would be too powerful for the lasagna I'm contemplating. I wonder if I can call my former husband at 2 a.m. to ask if he still has some of that spectacular Barolo and would he mind if I came by for a bottle this afternoon. I can almost persuade myself that this would be OK. I have to put the phone in my study, shut the door to my study, put an armchair in front of the door, and then walk to the other side of the house.