Traveling through Transylvania with cookbook author Irina Georgescu offered plenty of surprises—horses fa-vored over tractors, a widespread appetite for polenta, making soup out of spice-infused water, pumpkin bak-lava and omelets made with cornmeal, sour cream and dill. It also featured a host of baking recipes that were completely new to me, including plăcintă cu mere, a novel approach to pie-making—whip up an apple-walnut pie filling and stuff it between two flat layers of lean pie crust for a hybrid of bar cookie and slab pie.

In its original form, plăcintă cu mere is a simple, throw-together dessert. Our first step was to resize the reci-pe to fit a 9-inch springform pan, increase the amount of filling and add more fat to the dough to create something a tad richer. Irina Georgescu’s recipe calls for crème fraîche and clotted cream, but we ended up with sour cream as a reasonable substitute.

In keeping with the original recipe, the apples are shredded, not sliced, and this can be done on a box grater or in the food processor. We ended up using less than ½ cup sugar for over 2 pounds of apples to avoid over-powering the flavor of the apples (Grannies and sweet apples such as Gala or Honeycrisp are a good pairing). The plăcintă bakes in just 45 minutes and can serve as an afternoon snack or a dessert. It’s a fresh way of re-thinking apple pie and easier to make than the standard American pie—no need to fit the top dough to the bottom and create a sealed edge.

In an area that was once ruled by three different groups—the Hapsburgs, the Russians and the Ottomans—the cuisine of Transylvania tells a compelling story about food, history and overlapping cultures. It is a story, in part, about frugality, as in this common saying: “When spring leaves come, we are no longer hungry.”

Today, however, a visit to Transylvania will fill you up with some of the best and most compelling food on the planet.

Christopher Kimball

Christopher Kimball is founder of Milk Street, which produces Milk Street Magazine, Milk Street Television on PBS, and the weekly public radio show Milk Street Radio. He founded Cook’s Magazine in 1980 and was host and executive producer of America’s Test Kitchen until 2016. Kimball is the author of several books, including "The Yellow Farmhouse" and "Fannie’s Last Supper."