Some restaurants still treat lasagna like a ritual worth guarding all day, rolling fresh pasta and watching the sauce pot for hours. Other cooks found a way to get the same payoff in 20 minutes, and National Lasagna Day doesn’t ask which one’s right.
The all-day version usually comes from a grandmother’s recipe, refined for so long that nobody in the family would dare cut a corner. The 20-minute version exists because most people don’t have that recipe, that grandmother, or three free hours to babysit a sauce pot. This year’s National Lasagna Day, on July 29, isn’t picking a side.
Some restaurants never stopped rolling it by hand
In Providence, Angelo’s Civita Farnese has run the same lasagna recipe since 1924, layering beef Bolognese with ricotta, mozzarella and pecorino romano. In St. Louis, Rigazzi’s has served its six-layer Lasagna Pavarotti since two friends opened the place in 1957. And in San Francisco, Tommaso’s has kept its northern Italian lasagna on the menu since 1935, cooked out of the same wood-fired oven through four different owners.
TikTok cooks found a faster way in
Not everyone is rolling fresh pasta this year. TikTok creator april_eatz built a version out of wonton wrappers, stacking them with a seasoned pork filling and steaming the whole thing instead of baking it. Other cooks picked up the idea and ran with it, swapping in tofu, chicken and vegetables. It looks nothing like a Sunday casserole, but it runs on the same idea as Angelo’s: something rich, something starchy, and heat to pull it together.
Another version skips the oven completely. Creator dannylovespasta turned lasagna into a soup, simmering broken noodles in marinara and chicken broth with sausage and ground beef, then finishing it with cream, parmesan and mozzarella. The recipe took off after SZA asked him for it in the comments.
Nobody can even agree on what the word means
Here’s the twist: nobody fully agrees on what lasagna was ever supposed to mean. Some etymologists trace it back to a Latin word for a cooking pot, borrowed from a Greek word for a stand or trivet. Others point to a completely different Greek word for a flat sheet of dough. Neither side has won the argument yet.
So a soup, a steamed wonton stack, and a Sunday casserole all get to keep the name. If nobody can agree on what the word was pointing at in the first place, that argument was never going to get settled today.
Mandy Applegate is the creator behind Splash of Taste and seven other high-profile food and travel blogs. She’s also the co-founder of Food Drink Life Inc., a unique and highly rewarding collaborative blogger project. Her articles appear frequently on major online news sites, and she always has her eyes open to spot the next big trend.