When Everything’s Wrong, Only Baked Pasta Feels Right

Lasagna, like all baked pastas, is a dish that suggests being warm inside on a cold day. It is the kind of food that numbs pain and softens edges, turning a sharp and bitter world toward small, sense-based pleasures. The blurring effect of heavy carbs on the nervous system is much the same as a blasting radiator. And in a certain kind of cold weather, sometimes it’s hard to know if food is actually good, or just warm. Baked pasta is almost always both, but sometimes the temperature matters as much as the taste. That warmth itself, as a key ingredient in baked pasta, points to how these dishes act as a material form of unconditional love.

I started making lasagna, mac and cheese, baked ziti, and other variations on the theme about a year ago, during an uncertain fall that chilled into an oppressive winter. I love cheese and pasta and always have, but I hadn’t made them myself all that often until 2020. It seemed like these sorts of dishes required an occasion, a big family holiday with a heaving table. Dare I make one in my own home, on any normal day of the year, just because I wanted to show someone I loved them, or feel like I was loved? Just because I wanted the brain-smoothing comfort of a vat of pasta and cheese? I dared.

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