All the comfort of classic lasagna
For more than a century, Americans have adapted dishes with Italian roots like fettuccine Alfredo, chicken Parmesan and spaghetti with meatballs. Lasagna soup is the latest, a recipe that aims to take the work out of making the pasta casserole by mixing its components into a one-pot soup.
For its current moment in the spotlight, it can thank a Lego train. Last year, a Tiktok account tried to determine how many sheets of lasagna it would take to stop the toy locomotive (24, as it turns out). Danny Freeman, who posts as @dannylovespasta on social media, responded with a video from his kitchen in Beacon, New York. He tossed broken lasagna into a soup of marinara and ground beef and stirred it together.
A few days later, singer SZA made a request: “RECIPE PLEASE KING,” and Freeman posted it.
With more than 21 million views, Freeman’s version has become the foundation for dozens of online recreations and adaptations, including vegetarian and white-beanand-pesto soups.
“It feels like you’re eating a home-cooked meal that your grandmother spent all day doing, but it’s something you throw together for your family,” said Freeman, the author of the 2023 cookbook “Danny Loves Pasta,” who began posting recipes online during the pandemic. He now makes lasagna soup at home at least once every two weeks during the winter. “It feels new and fresh,” he said, “even though it’s been around for a long time.”
Traditional lasagna, baked in a casserole dish, first became popular in the 1930s in Italian American restaurants and was presented as frozen food in the 1950s, said Ian Macallen, the author of “Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American.” The soup version was likely first introduced at Windsor’s
Lounge at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago during the 1990s, when red-sauce Italian restaurants began to close, he said.
The soup gained traction in the late aughts, likely when the Campbell’s Soup Co. published a recipe for it that included beef broth. Macallen said that a rise in the use of slow cookers also could’ve contributed to the soup’s popularity.
Italian American recipes like lasagna soup have nostalgic staying power. The soup provides the same sense of comfort, Macallen said, and in a world dealing with wars, inflation and fallout from the pandemic, people are seeking that contentment from Italian American cuisine.
“They’re eating their feelings, and it tastes like Italian food,” he said.