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.