Pastry · Market-Stall Staple

Plăcintă

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The name comes from the Latin placenta, a flat cake — and it passed from Romanian into Hungarian as palacsinta and into Austrian German as Palatschinke.

Plăcintă is a thin-dough pastry sold whole or by the slice from bakeries, train-station kiosks, and roadside stalls across Romania, filled with soft cheese, cabbage, apple, or pumpkin depending on the vendor and season.

Why it's made this way: Layered dough pastries like plăcintă trace back to home kitchens that stretched simple flour-and-water dough over whatever filling was on hand.