Pastitsio
Greek baked pasta dish
Pastitsio (Greek: παστίτσιο, pastítsio) is a baked pasta dish with ground meat and béchamel sauce from the Ionian Islands in Greece. Variations of the dish are found in other countries near the Mediterranean.
Name and origin
Pastitsio takes its name from the Venetian pasticcio, a large family of baked savory pies that may be based on meat, fish, or pasta, with many documented recipes from the early 16th century, and continuing to modern times. Italian versions include a pastry crust; some include béchamel.
The word pasticcio is attested by the 16th century as "any manner of pastie or pye" and comes from the vulgar Latin word pastīcium derived from pasta, and means "pie", and has developed the figurative meanings of "a mess", "a tough situation", or a pastiche.
The name of an Italian version, lasagna, made with flat pasta, comes from Latin lasanum, "cooking pot".
Greece
Nikolaos Tselementes, a French-trained Greek chef of the early 20th century, created the au gratin version with béchamel. Tselementes' published version is now ubiquitous. It has a bottom layer of bucatini or other tubular pasta, with cheese or egg as a binder and a middle layer of ground beef (or a mix of ground beef and ground pork) with tomato sauce, cinnamon and cloves. The top layer is a béchamel or a Mornay sauce, with spices like nutmeg or allspice.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pastitsio” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.