This content explores an ancient Roman dessert called "placenta" (or "plagenta"), detailing its historical context, recipe reconstruction, and the complex linguistic debate surrounding its pronunciation, while also delving into the life and legacy of Cato the Elder, the source of the recipe.
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The Cheesecake Factory has almost every kind of cheesecake imaginable,
almost.
Because nowhere on their 96-page menu will you find placenta
but that's what we're making today,
a layered cheesecake from ancient Rome with the unfortunate name of placenta,
or plagenta, or placenta.
I will be doing a rant about that later,
so stick around for that and more this time on Tasting History.
It is week four of Rome month, we made it!
Sponsored by the folks over at Creative Assembly to celebrate their release of
Total War Rome Remastered, out now so take a look.
And to celebrate the game's release I'm baking a cake, sort of.
See in 'De agri cultura' by Cato the Elder he gives us several recipes for cheesecakes for lack of a better term,
and one of those cheesecakes is called placenta depending on how you pronounce your Latin
and here comes my rant...
See there are several accepted pronunciations of Latin and specific
letters and sounds in the language, and none is more contested than the letter C.
In Roman ecclesiastical or church Latin it would be pronounced placenta. In other pronunciations
it would be placenta or placenta with a soft C just like we say Caesar but many reconstructive
linguists believed that a C was always pronounced as a K in old Latin so it would be placenta and
that would make Caesar, Kaiser and you will find many people who fight over the pronunciation.
You'll probably see it in the comments section right now and from a purely academic perspective
it is rather interesting to kind of argue and debate which is right but when it comes to people
who stand by the fact that their version of Latin pronunciation is the one and only true version,
I think it's a little bit silly don't you?
Latin was a living and evolving language for over a thousand years just like English,
and it was spoken by all walks of society over a vast empire.
In fact there are ancient Roman writings complaining about how other ancient Romans were pronouncing their Latin.
There were probably just as many ways to pronounce Latin as there are English,
and English has the added modern benefit of TV and radio to at least somewhat standardize it.
The way I pronounce English words is somewhat different than somebody who lives in Orange county just 50 miles away
and very, very different from someone who lives in Alabama or New Zealand, or Scotland
and I bet it's extremely different from how Henry VIII spoke it but it's all still English.
So until someone finds a recording of the Roman Senate circa 160 BC or kirka 160 BC or circa 160 BC,
don't let anyone Latin pronunciation shame you.
That said the pronunciation of today's dish
actually probably was placenta because it comes from a Greek word that is spelled with a K.
Thus endeth the rant.
To make placenta: two pounds of wheat flour for the crust, four pounds of flour,
and two pounds of the best groats for the tracta. Soak the groats in water and when it becomes quite soft,
pour into a clean bowl, drain well and knead with your hands. When it is well-kneaded work in
the four pounds of flour gradually. This dough is to make the tracta and spread them out in a basket to dry.
When they are dry coat them with oil then moisten the two pounds of flour, knead and form a thin lower crust.
Soak 14 pounds of sheep's cheese, not sour and quite fresh in water.
Soften it changing the water three times. When the cheese is well dried, knead it in a clean bowl by hand,
and make it as smooth as possible.
Add four and a half pounds of fine honey, and mix it well with the cheese.
Place the crust on oiled bay leaves, and form the placenta.
First place down a single tracta... spread it with the mixture from the bowl, add the tracta one by one covering
each layer until you have used up all the cheese and honey. On the top place a single tracta, and
then fold over the crust. Then put the placenta in the oven cover with a hot crock, and surround with coals.
When it is done remove and spread with honey. This will make a half-modious cake.
So this cake was huge. Though it was meant as a religious offering.
So it's ancient Rome so you got a lot of gods to feed,
but I'm cutting it down because I don't need to be buying 14 Roman pounds of cheese.
So for this recipe what you'll need is: 2/3 cup or 120 grams of groats, preferably spelt or emer.
2 cups or 240 grams of wheat flour, 3/4 of a cup or 177 milliliters of water,
and one tablespoon of olive oil. That is for the tracta. For the crust you'll need one cup
or 120 grams of flour, and a quarter cup or 59 milliliters of water.
For the filling you'll need 1 and 3/4 pound or 790 grams of sheep's cheese, you can also use cow's cheese that's fine.
Just make sure it's like kind of crumbly.
And 3/4 of a cup or 255 grams of honey.
Plus some bay leaves with olive oil to coat them.
So first let's make our tracta.
Now last week I made tracta for the roast pig, and this week I'm making it very similarly but slightly differently
just to you know see how it turns out.
So take your groats and grind them just a bit. You want to leave them quite coarse.
Then add the water and let them soak for about a day.
Last week's finer semolina just had to soak for 20 minutes these need to soak for about a day
before you get them nice and mushy.
Then incorporate them with the flour to make the dough. You can add more water if necessary but
do it sparingly because you want this to be pretty dry. Knead the dough for about 10 minutes until it's nice and smooth,
then divide it into four to six pieces and roll into disks.
Cato is not specific in how many layers this cake is going to be. It kind of depends on the size of your dish,
but they should be rolled out fairly thin, think like a flour tortilla.
Then lay them out to dry this can take a while especially if you're somewhere that it's humid,
granted i'm in LA so mine dried overnight.
In fact probably a little too much, they were pretty hard and dry, though
not as hard as the hardtack.
And then we make the crust. Now this is not a nice flaky pie crust or
like a phyllo dough which modern versions of this cake are made with phyllo dough i'm sure they're fantastic.
This is going to be very different because it's just water and flour.
So mix the flour with the water until it comes together to form a dough and don't feel that you need to use all the water.
If it comes together before you've used it all, stop.
Then roll it out to be a large disk about twice as wide as you want your cake to be.
It can be more or less but try to make it as big as you can because we are going to be wrapping this cake.
The last component is our filling and Cato says to
wash the cheese or rinse it in water three times and that was because the cheese would have been
very, very salty so to get the salt out. So depending on the cheese that you have you
might not need to do it three times. I did do it three times because I had fairly salty cheese and
because it made it softer each time I did it and you want this to be nice and soft.
So rinse your cheese and then drain it as much as possible. Then mash it up until it's nice and smooth.
Then mix in the honey until well incorporated and it is time to assemble our placenta.
By the way placenta as in like the thing that a baby grows inside of was actually named after the cake.
So clearly somebody saw placenta one day and thought "Hm, that looks like cake."
So line a dish with oiled bay leaves. These should help flavor the cake as well as stop it from sticking to the dish.
Then set your crust in over the leaves. Then brush one of the tracta with oil and set it in the middle of the dish,
and then spread some cheese and honey mixture on top.
Cover that with another oiled tractor and repeat until you've used up all of the filling.
Finishing with an oiled tracta on top.
Then fold over the crust to enclose the cake as much as you can.
Then cover the dish and set it in an oven at 300 degrees Fahrenheit or 150 Celsius for about 70 minutes.
Now we have covered the lives of several recipe writers here on the show but they all pale in comparison to
Cato the Elder. See his father died young and Cato inherited the family farm and so he had to learn all about
farming at a young age hence later on writing 'De Agri Cultura' which means on farming or on
agriculture but Cato lived in extraordinary times and as the old song says
how ya going to keep them down on the farm after they've seen Paris?
Though in this case it's after he's seen Hannibal.
In 218 BC Hannibal Barca paraded a bunch of elephants and carthaginians across the alps
and into Italy to make a right mess of things. Well being a teenager coming from
military stock Marcus Porcius Cato, Cato, and yes Porcius was his middle name or Porcus.
If anyone can find me a picture or draw me a picture of Porky the Pig
in like ancient Roman garb I would just love that. Share that with me on Instagram.
Anyway Marcus Porcius Cato left the family farm to go fight in the Second Punic War where he quickly rose to the
rank of military tribune under the General Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus.
This poor guy was named Verrucosus to delineate him from other members of his family and Verrucosus means wart or warty
because he had a wart on his upper lip. That's just got to wreak havoc on a kid's self-esteem right?
Anyway he turned out all right, as did Cato because after distinguishing himself in
the war he was befriended by the wealthy and powerful Lucius Valerius Flaccus who
convinced Cato to move to the city of Rome and enter politics.
Cato soon became known for his austerity his traditional roman principles and his dogged persecution of moral decay.
"He was undoubtedly a man of a rough temper and a bitter and unbridled tongue, and absolute master
of his passions, of inflexible integrity and indifferent alike to wealth and popularity."
Something makes me think that he was a bit like the ancient Roman Rex Banner.
"Rex Banner. I'm running this department now."
Though unlike Rex Banner who was a fan of trial by catapult
Cato helped to limit cruel and unusual punishment but unusual laws not so much.
He was an avid proponent of the Lex Oppia or opien laws and these were a set of sanctuary laws or consumption laws
put in place during the Second Punic War to help Rome kind of bolster its depleted war chest
but they were mostly aimed toward women.
How much money women could have.
What they could wear. What colors. What fabrics and if they could take carriages and at what time and where.
And after the war many thought that the laws were no longer necessary and should be repealed
and the women of Rome took to the streets to make their displeasure known but Cato was not persuaded.
"I should like to be told what it is that has led these matrons to rush out into the streets in a tumult...
What excuse is offered for this present feminine insurrection? We want to gleam with purple
and gold says one of them and to ride in our carriages on festival days and on ordinary days...
we want no limit to our spending and our extravagance. You have often heard my complaints about the
excessive spending of the women... a plague which has been the destruction of all great empires."
And somehow this man convinced two women to marry him in his lifetime now the laws were repealed but
his opposition made Cato more popular than ever. First with many, many citizens and then with his soldiers,
because he re-entered military life where he ate and worked alongside his men and
led them to a number of victories both in Spain and Greece. And that gave him the clout to return
to the capital and begin a public indictment of Rome's most famous and well-respected general
Scipio Africanus, the man who defeated Hannibal.
Cato believed that Scipio had become a little big for his britches and accused him of corruption
which was probably true and Scipio ended up retiring from public life.
Cato was so good at persecuting the actions of others that he ended
up becoming one of the most famous censors in Roman history. A censor was an official job title
and they were in charge of maintaining public morality amongst other things.
Truly the perfect job for dear old Cato.
One thing he tried to stamp out was the growing influence of the
hellenistic culture of Greece on the Roman people.
Their religion literature and language were all
becoming very popular in the Republic and he saw that as degrading the traditional Roman values.
The men did not like change unless that change involved limiting the wealth of women because
a few years after the Lex Oppia was repealed he supported a set of new laws called the Lex Orchia
which did many of the same things. In addition they limited the number of guests someone could have at
feasts and other gatherings.
There were some very weird laws.
But Cato's most infamous object of
scorn is epitomized in his line carthago delenda est. 'Carthage must be destroyed'.
He used to say it after every speech in the Senate whether the preceding speech had anything to do with Carthage or not.
But by this time Cato was a fairly old man and so he could remember the Second Punic War and
the havoc that was wrought by Hannibal and Carthage on the Roman people and he was seeing
that Carthage was becoming strong again.
In one story which I actually mentioned in my video on figs one of my very first videos,
Cato is upset and and frustrated with the younger Senators
and their inability to see Carthage as a threat. They think that it's too far away to pose any real danger.
"Burning with a moral hatred of Carthage...
Cato one day brought with him into the senate house a ripe fig,
the produce of that country. Showing it to the assembled Senators he said
'Know that this fig was plucked at Carthage but the day before yesterday.
That is how near the enemy is to our walls."
And according to Pliny the Elder that is what started the Third Punic War. It's probably
not true but that's what Pliny wrote,
though anything that Pliny has to say especially on Cato
kind of suspect because he- I believe the term is stanned Cato. He just loved Cato and everything that he did.
Yeah, he had a lot of influence on him.
Sadly Cato never got to see the destruction of Carthage because he died before it happened,
but before he died he left us perhaps his most lasting legacy in his writings on agriculture.
De Agri Cultura, it's one of the first significant
pieces of Latin prose and it had an influence on other Roman writings for centuries including Pliny.
And while there are several recipes in it as well as lots of information on other foods and
ingredients and growing practices of the time it's really a treatise on how to run a farm profitably as a business.
And it's in those sections that you get some of Cato's more blegh advice.
The most blegh being that he thinks that you should cut the rations of slaves if they're not working hard enough,
and when they get old or if they're sick instead of taking care of them which
was the practice at the time you should just sell them.
Just get rid of them, not your problem anymore.
Not really a very nice guy from our modern perspective but from his perspective and from
the perspective of many of his contemporaries he embodied all of the virtues and qualities
of a traditional Roman citizen.
As he wrote "When they would praise a worthy man,
their praise took the form good husband, good farmer; it is from the farming class that the bravest men,
and the sturdiest soldiers come."
So I suppose it's important that you know how to farm and by extension
know how to make a good placenta cake
if you want to be the kind of soldier who can build an empire like you will in Total War Rome Remastered.
Once the placenta has baked for 70 minutes it should be ready to eat.
Thought if you want to darken it up a little bit just for some color you can take the top off of the pot
and cook it for another 10 minutes. Now this wouldn't have been an issue if i had just
heaped coals on top of it like the recipe said, but I'm told that I'm not allowed to put coals in our oven anymore.
So I just took the top off.
So after 10 minutes take it out of the oven and slather it in honey.
And here we are Cato's placenta.
That sounds really gross and now you know why it's better to say placenta.
Slice it open to see the layers. Fairly defined.
It's actually really pretty that sheen of the honey on top. Let's get a piece here.
Okay it does not- it does not hold together very well. Kind of like falling apart. Let's try it.
Hmm! What's not to love.
It's honey and cheese. You really get the bay leaf though.
The dominant flavor is definitely the honey but the bay leaf is really, really strong in a good way. It's- it's refreshing.
It's really, really nice. The texture I can see why they go with phyllo dough now.
And now I don't know that this is exactly the the width of tracta that he made
but it's a little- it's a little chewy. I think it's absorbed a lot of the oil and the honey,
and the cheese mixture and everything so it's a little chewy.
Crisp. It's crisp and chewy, is that a thing? I don't even know. I wish it was more like just i wish it was filo doug.
iIt's still really good though.
So thank you all for sticking with me for an entire month of Roman recipes,
and thank you Creative Assembly and Total War Rome Remastered for sponsoring the
month and giving me the impetus to actually do it. It's been a lot of fun. Also they're going to be
giving me some free game codes to to give out so follow me on Instagram, I'm probably going to do
most of the giving there because it's easier to follow people and everything rather than in the
comments here. So follow me on Instagram and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
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