It may sound hard to believe, but I didn’t have my first taste of lasagna until I left home for college. Other Italian favorites — spaghetti and pizza — were often on the table, but never lasagna.
It’s not because it’s a labor-intensive dish to prepare. My mother never shied away from dishes that involved extra steps. She loved to cook. It’s just that my father hated it. He explained why, but it still made no sense whatsoever. He loved the tomato sauce, ground beef and pasta that goes into a good dish of lasagna, but he abhorred ricotta cheese.
He adored good cheeses, but he likened ricotta cheese to cottage cheese, for which he had developed a distaste in childhood.
“Grandma used to make her own cottage cheese,” he once told me, “and it makes me sick just to think about it.”
His grandparents had a big farm in Virginia with plenty of dairy cows, so milk was always available. And his grandmother would make her own cottage cheese by leaving milk out on the counter for days until it soured and curdled. Once done, she’d dip into it with a spoon and enjoy every last bite. But my dad said the sight and smell were just too much for him to stomach, and it turned him against cottage cheese for the rest of his almost 86 years.