Placenta cake

Placenta cake is a dessert from ancient Greece and Rome made of many layers of dough, mixed with cheese and honey, flavored with bay leaves, baked and then covered in honey.^[1][2] It is mentioned in the Greek poems of Archestratos and Antiphanes, as well as in the De Agri Cultura of Cato the Elder.^[2]

Placenta

A Greek plăcintă-maker in Bucharest in 1880.
Type	Pie
Place of origin	Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome
Main ingredients	Flour and semolina dough, cheese, honey, bay leaves
Variations	plăcintă, palatschinke
Cookbook: Placenta   Media: Placenta

Name

The Latin word placenta comes from the Greek word plakous used for thin or layered breads.^[3][4][5] The word plakous comes from the Greek word plakoeis (Ancient Greek: πλακόεις) meaning "flat".^[3][4][5][6]

History

The placenta cake first appears as plakous (Ancient Greek: πλακοῦς) in the ancient Greek poems of Archestratos who describes it as a dessert served with nuts and dried fruits.^[2] Antiphanes in 4th century BC describes plakous as a dessert made with wheat flour and goat's cheese.^[2]

In 160 BC, Cato the Elder wrote a recipe for placenta in his De Agri Cultura following the Greek recipe for plakous.^[2][7] Cato possibly copied the recipe from a Greek cookbook.^[2][7]

The Byzantine descendants of plakous are the plakountas tetyromenous ("cheesy placenta") and the koptoplakous (Byzantine Greek: κοπτοπλακοῦς) both of which are the ancestors of modern foods like tiropita, börek, banitsa, and baklava.^[1][8] The name placenta (Greek: πλατσέντα) is used today on the Greek island of Lesbos to describe a dessert made with thin layers of pastry and crushed nuts that is baked and then covered in honey.^{[9][10][11][12]} The Greek dessert was adopted into Armenian food as plagindi, plagunda, and pghagund all meaning "cakes of bread and honey."^[13]

Related pages

• Greek food