[Dr Winston O Boogie jr]

Originally Posted by senior citizen

I hear you.........I always have used ricotta & mozzarella in my lasagna........(I beat an egg or two into my ricotta to make it creamier, depending on the size of my lasagna pans (quantity).

Southern Italian lasagna, which I was raised on, has the RICOTTA & MOZARELLA & meat sauce layered with the boiled lasagna noodles. Same type of lasagna to which you are referring..........yes, delicious. Very traditional recipe.

Although I've always made my traditional recipe with ricotta, the lazy lasagna recipe was a NORTHERN Italian recipe.

Various regions of Italy have differing cousine.............same as our vast U.S.

I was fascinated with the northern type lasagna using béchamel sauce ever since I discovered that my paternal grandmother's ancestors came from a small village over the Italian border in Austria.......the descendants now on the other side of the border in the Trent Fondo area.......have blue eyes & red / blonde hair.

The strange thing about doing the genealogy on the "northern" branch of the family.......they have Germanic first names with the Italian surname......still living in Austria. Back, after 1599, someone must have traveled from those mountains.......all the way down through Italia......to the southern "boot"......a long long time ago...........where the surname is still going strong.

My grandmother, born in the mountains of southern Italy has the blue eyes (as did one of her sons & one of her daughters). Everyone else had the dark brown eyes & hair.

Thus, I'm branching out to northern Italian dishes.....which one can easily order in a good restaurant. Like anything else, it's only as good as the cook (or the recipe).



Northern Italian Lasagna

Northern Italian Lasagna (with a white cream sauce / béchamel ) I found a similar recipe (to the first one I posted) with accompanying video.

Keep scrolling down for various photos , plus how it looks at completion.

Some folks love it "just for a change of pace".........others, the pure traditionalists, like the ricotta type we are used to.
It's all good. We all love the traditional recipe with the RICOTTA........however, the béchamel white sauce is also nice for a "change of pace".......

That makes sense now, except that most northern dishes don't have tomatoes or tomato sauce. My maternal grandparents came here from Italy, but I've never been able to find out exactly where. I've been told that it's somewhere central. My grandfather had blue eyes as do I, but my Scottish grandparents also had blue eyes so I'm not sure where I got them from. Both of my parents had brown eyes.

Northern Italians are closely related to the Swiss as far a cuisine and customs. That is why the blue eyes and lack of tomatoes.

On an interesting note, as much as we associate tomatoes and tomato sauce with the Italians, there were no tomatoes in Italy, or Europe for that matter until Christopher brought them back from the Americas in the 1490s. I'd love to learn what Italians ate prior to that.