Placenta cake

For the temporary organ unique to Eutherian mammals, see Placenta.
Placenta
Type Pie
Place of origin Roman empire
Main ingredients Flour and semolina dough, cheese, honey, bay leaves
Cookbook: Placenta  Media: Placenta
A Greek plăcintă-maker in Bucharest in 1880

Placenta is a dish from ancient Rome consisting of many dough layers interspersed with a mixture of cheese and honey and flavored with bay leaves, then baked and covered in honey.[1][2] Cato included a recipe in his De Agri Cultura.[3] Cato writes:

Shape the placenta as follows: place a single row of tracta along the whole length of the base dough. This is then covered with the mixture [cheese and honey] from the mortar. Place another row of tracta on top and go on doing so until all the cheese and honey have been used up. Finish with a layer of tracta.[2]

It derives from the Greek term plakous (Greek: "πλακοῦς", gen. "πλακοῦντος" – plakountos) for thin or layered flat breads,[4][5][6] and several scholars suggest that its Byzantine descendants, koptoplakous (Medieval Greek: κοπτοπλακοῦς) and plakountas tetyromenous, are the ancestors of modern baklava and tiropita (börek) respectively.[7][2][8] A variant of the Roman dish survived into the modern era as the Romanian plăcintă cake.

References

  1. ↑ "American Pie". American Heritage. April–May 2006. Retrieved 2009-07-04. The Romans refined the recipe, developing a delicacy known as placenta, a sheet of fine flour topped with cheese and honey and flavored with bay leaves.
  2. 1 2 3 Faas, Patrick (2005). Around the Roman Table. University of Chicago Press. p. 184-185. ISBN 0226233472.
  3. ↑ Cato the Elder. "De Agricultura".
  4. ↑ placenta, Charlton T. Lewis, Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, on Perseus
  5. ↑ πλακοῦς, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus project
  6. ↑ placenta, Concise Oxford English Dictionary Luxury Edition, Oxford University Press, 2011, p.
  7. ↑ Rena Salaman, "Food in Motion the Migration of Foodstuffs and Cookery Techniques" from the Oxford Symposium on Food Cookery, Vol. 2, p. 184
  8. ↑ Speros Vryonis The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor, 1971, p. 482


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