Oven roasted sea bream

We bought a pink sea bream on the market at Puy-L’Evêque with the intention of cooking it on an outdoor charcoal barbeque. It was a fine specimen which was very fresh, as was all the fish on the stall. Our barbeque plans had to be set aside due to unseasonally inclement weather so we roasted in the oven using a ubiquitous Mediterranean recipe that we first found in Sophie Grigson and William Black’s excellent Fish book. The recipe is apparently often made as a special meal on Christmas Eve in Spain but we have also found it in September on Greek islands.

The recipe is very simple. Take an ovenproof dish big enough to hold the fish and grease it well with olive oil. Put in a few layers of sliced potato and onion and pour over a blended mixture of olive oil, parsley (plenty of it), garlic and some water. Put this in an oven at around 180 degrees Centigrade for about 20 minutes until the potatoes and onions are starting to cook well, you may need to put some baking foil over the dish to stop the potatoes and onions blackening. Take the gutted and scaled bream and make a few deep slashes down to the backbone on both sides. Season with seat salt and ground black pepper and rub the juice of a lemon into the skin. Place this on top of the potatoes and onions, pour over some more olive oil and return to the oven. You may wish to put some slices of tomatoes in as well. The final cooking time will depend on the size of the fish but it will be readily apparent when the flesh exposed by the slashes is cooked. We have found that the dish can remain in the oven for quite some time after it is first cooked without any significant dryness or deterioration which makes it a very useful dinner party dish where exact timing is usually impossible.