Bubbling, cheesy lasagne, straight from the oven, mmmmm. I wonder whether you like this Italian dish as much as I do!

If you do, and next time you have it for dinner, spare a thought for the Romans — they used the word lasagne to mean something VERY different!

(Warning: if you don’t want to insult the cook, don’t read on…!)

There’s no polite way of saying this, so I’ll just come straight out and say it. In the days of the Romans, a lasanum was a chamber pot, or portable loo. Strange as it may seem, the Italians took that word and applied it to their cooking pots! Perhaps one day an Italian diner decided to make a mean joke about the dish they’d been served and suggested the cooking tasted a bit like the contents of a toilet? How rude!

Over time, the name for the cooking dish that was traditionally used to cook a meal of pasta, meat, and cheese became attached to the meal itself, and that’s how we still use ‘lasagne’ today.

By the way, until a law was passed in the 1800s to ban it, chamber pots were regularly emptied out of windows, splattering innocent pedestrians with their contents. Ugh! If I’d lived back then I would have definitely preferred a mountain of lasagne on my head…