Plăcinte

The smell of morning

In Chișinău, the morning smells of fried dough. At kiosks, bakeries and market stalls, flat filled pastries pass across the counter, warm and wrapped in paper. They are called plăcinte. According to Moldova's national tourism office, no dish better symbolises the Moldovan people and their traditions. A plăcintă with cheese and a bowl of sour cream makes a full lunch here, eaten by hand on the go.

A Latin name

The name is older than the country. Plăcintă comes from the Latin placenta, meaning cake, and that word goes back to the Greek plakous, a flat cake. A distant ancestor often mentioned is the Roman placenta, a cake of cheese and honey described by the statesman Cato the Elder more than two thousand years ago. By the early nineteenth century, plăcintă was already on the menus of Odesa, next to dishes from the Balkans. From Bessarabia, the pastry spread across the steppe of southern Ukraine.

Dough, filling, folding

The classic pan-fried version starts with a simple dough of flour, warm water, oil and salt, left to rest for half an hour. Each ball is rolled out thin. The filling goes in the middle, and the edge is folded over it in flaps, like the petals of a flower. Then the pastry is pressed flat and fried golden brown on both sides in a pan with a little oil. Other versions go in the oven, made with puff pastry or with dough stretched paper thin.

What goes inside

The filling follows the season and the larder. Crumbled brânză with dill is the best known. There are also plăcinte with braised cabbage, with potato and fried onion, or with pumpkin. Sweet versions get apple, cherries or sweet fresh cheese. During the fasting periods of the Orthodox Church, when dairy stays off the table, people choose cabbage, potato or pumpkin. At home, a spoonful of sour cream comes with it, and a cup of tea or a glass of wine.

From kitchen to chain

In Moldova, whole restaurants are named after the pastry. The chain La Plăcinte, founded in Moldova, already had three branches in Bucharest by twenty fourteen. The neighbours claim the pastry too. In twenty twenty-two, Ukraine added its platsynda tradition to the national list of intangible heritage, and Romania obtained European protection for the plăcintă from Dobruja.

Small but old

A plăcintă is small, cheap and quickly eaten. But break one open and you hold a piece of history. The name comes from the Latin of Rome, the pastry travelled as far as Odesa and the steppe by the Black Sea, and the filling still comes from the vegetable garden and the sheepfold. Three countries call the pastry their own, and in Moldova it is simply everyday food.