Placenta cake


Placenta cake is a dish from ancient Greece and Rome consisting of many dough layers interspersed with a mixture of cheese and honey and flavored with bay leaves, baked and then covered in honey. The dessert is mentioned in classical texts such as the Greek poems of Archestratos and Antiphanes, as well as the De Agri Cultura of Cato the Elder.

Etymology

The Latin word placenta is derived from the Greek plakous for thin or layered flat breads.
The cake gave its name to the organ, owing to the latter's shape.

History

In circa 350 BC, the ancient Greek poet Archestratos registered plakous as a dessert served with nuts and dried fruits; the honey-drenched Athenian version of plakous was commended by the poet. The Greek comic poet Antiphanes, a contemporary of Archestratos, provided an ornate description of plakous and mentioned wheat flour and goat's cheese as its key ingredients. Later in 160 BC, Cato the Elder provided a recipe for placenta in his De Agri Cultura that Andrew Dalby considers, along with Cato's other dessert recipes, to be in the "Greek tradition", possibly copied from a Greek cookbook. Cato writes:
A number of modern scholars suggest that the Greco-Roman dessert's Eastern Roman descendants, plakountas tetyromenous and koptoplakous, are the ancestors of modern tiropita and baklava respectively. The name placenta is used today on the island of Lesbos in Greece to describe a baklava-type dessert of layered pastry leaves containing crushed nuts that is baked and then covered in honey. Through its Greek name plakountos, the dessert was adopted into Armenian cuisine as plagindi, plagunda, and pghagund, all "cakes of bread and honey." From the latter term came the later Arabic name iflaghun, which is mentioned in the medieval Arab cookbook Wusla ila al-habib as a specialty of the Cilician Armenians settled in southern Asia Minor and settled in the neighboring Crusader kingdoms of northern Syria. Thus, the dish may have traveled to the Levant in the Middle Ages via the Armenians, many of whom migrated there following the first appearance of the Turkish tribes in medieval Anatolia. Other variants of the Greco-Roman dish survived into the modern era in the form of the Romanian plăcintă and the Viennese palatschinke.

Citations