L’orata con le patate di Miriam

Miriam’s sea bream baked with potatoes

Our favorite place to eat Roman Jewish food isn’t in the ghetto, but in the other direction down the river, where classical Rome makes way for industrial Rome, just over the Ponte Testaccio in via Ettore Roli. It’s called C’è Pasta e Pasta (“There Is Pasta and Pasta”).

One of the owners, Miriam, is a beautiful woman for whom Vincenzo can’t hide his admiration. She is formidable too, which he also admires. For months, while he grinned over the glass counter, I bristled while looking at the lasagne, pretending to be nonplussed. One day last year, when my enthusiasm for her food and curiosity about the setup in this small tavola calda (canteen-style café) got the better of me, I asked her to give me her recipe for this book.

In short, what I learned was that a wishful conversation between Jewish friends about making and selling fresh egg pasta had become a reality a few years back when they took a long lease on a property on the corner of via Ettore Roli. As well as the pasta, they also decided to serve a small selection of hot dishes from the counter, the sort of simple, traditional, genuine kosher home cooking that they felt was missing from Rome. Almost immediately the hot food was a success, both in the Jewish community and among the locals, who queued up for the freshly fried fritti, daily minestre, and lasagne. C’è Pasta e Pasta is one of the few places in Rome that serves indivia, a type of bitter greens, baked with anchovies, and salt cod with tomato, pine nuts, and raisins. They also make a dish I have adopted at home: baked fish with a potato crust.

By covering fillets of fish with a layer of finely sliced potatoes, the fish both steams and bakes and therefore remains tender. The potatoes in turn are soft and forgiving underneath and crispy and slightly chewy on the top. Even if you do some elaborate, fish-scale-like arranging of the potato, it’s an extremely simple dish to make, good with a green salad and a glass of something fragrant.

serves 4

olive oil, for greasing and baking

1½ pounds fish fillets, ideally bream, with or without skin

salt and freshly ground black pepper

1¾ pounds Yukon Gold potatoes

Preheat the oven to 400°F and grease a square ovenproof dish or baking sheet with olive oil.

Arrange the fish fillets, skin-side down if they have skin, in a single layer and season them with salt and pepper. Slice the potatoes very thinly (a mandoline is helpful here) and arrange them—neatly or not so neatly—over the fish so that the fillets are completely covered. Zig-zag the potatoes with olive oil and season them with a little more salt.

Bake for 20–25 minutes, or until the potatoes are tender underneath, golden on top and crisp at the edges.