Placenta cake

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

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.^[1]^[2] 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.^[2] It is often seen as the predecessor of baklava and börek.^[3]^[4]^[1]

^ ^a ^b Faas 2005, pp. 184–185.
^ ^a ^b Goldstein 2015, "ancient world": "The next cake of note, first mentioned about 350 B.C.E. by two Greek poets, is plakous. [...] At last, we have recipes and a context to go with the name. Plakous is listed as a delicacy for second tables, alongside dried fruits and nuts, by the gastronomic poet Archestratos. He praises the plakous made in Athens because it was soaked in Attic honey from the thyme-covered slopes of Mount Hymettos. His contemporary, the comic poet Antiphanes, tells us the other main ingredients, goat’s cheese and wheat flour. Two centuries later, in Italy, Cato gives an elaborate recipe for placenta (the same name transcribed into Latin), redolent of honey and cheese. The modern Romanian plăcintă and the Viennese Palatschinke, though now quite different from their ancient Greek and Roman ancestor, still bear the same name."
^ κοπτός Archived 2021-02-24 at the Wayback Machine, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, on Perseus
^ Traditional Greek Cooking: A Memoir with Recipes. ISBN 9781859641170.