Gnocchi all’Amatriciana
From Katie Parla’s new book, "Rome"
I have a special place in my heart for Rome. I like to say I “lived” there once. Even though it was only for three weeks, while I was working as the food stylist on Eat, Pray, Love, I really got the feel for what it might be like to actually live there. (Read more about my time in Rome here or here.) The city was relatively quiet because it was the end of the summer, so most of the Romans were out of town, except for the movie crew which was mostly Italian. I stayed on the beautiful Via Giulia, just a block off the Tiber, and about equidistant from the Campo De’ Fiori and the Vatican, and an easy walk to just about everywhere else. I can understand why Katie Parla came to Rome a few years after finishing her studies and NEVER LEFT.
Although Katie is considered an expert on Italian food in general, and gives tours throughout Italy, Rome is where she calls home. Her new book, Rome: A Culinary History, Cookbook, and Field Guide to the Flavors That Built a City, is, as she will explain below, more than just a cookbook. Besides having more than 100 solid recipes, it is the insider’s guidebook you’ll want for your research the next time you visit The Eternal City.
When I leafed through her book in search of a recipe to try, I immediately settled on the Gnocchi all’Amatriciana. I love gnocchi (who doesn’t?) and I definitely don’t make it often enough considering how simple it is to execute. Chances are you have a couple of potatoes lying around, and flour too, which is all you need! But do note that you can use store-bought gnocchi to make this a truly quick recipe for a weeknight.
The Amatriciana sauce is one of those classic pasta sauces of Rome (along with Carbonara) that everyone should know how to make. They really epitomize the utter simplicity of Roman cooking. I’ll be trying Katie’s Carbonara technique next (it’s all in the technique).
My supermarket started carrying guanciale (cured pork jowl) a few years ago, but I know not everyone can get it easily. Though Katie explains that some people consider pancetta (cured pork belly) to be ersatz, it is perfectly delicious and I promise the pasta police won’t come after you!
I know I told you I’d be spending New Year’s Eve alone, but that non-plan fell by the wayside when Steve came home early from his retreat because he fell on the ice and broke his shoulder. While I wasn’t happy that he hurt himself, I was happy that I had a date. We invited people over for cocktails and snacks and everyone left by 9:30, which was kind of the best of both worlds. I served the gnocchi which I had made earlier in the day, and it was the perfect thing to fill people’s bellies with something warm and comforting, along with the rest of our potluck snack spread.
And now, my Q and A with Katie:
Just a quick note: This post may get truncated as it’s too long for email. If it’s cut off, you can click the post title or any of the photos to read it in your browser instead!
A Conversation With Katie Parla
SUSAN SPUNGEN: How is this book different from a typical cookbook?
KATIE PARLA: Only about a quarter of the words are dedicated to recipes. The first 80 or so pages are devoted to the city’s history viewed through the lens of food, from the Iron Age to the present. Much of the rest of the book is devoted to features and reported stories that examine food culture as lived experience. That means markets, bakeries, slaughterhouses, wine bars, and street food are all treated as serious sites of history and meaning. The 110 recipes appear within that framework. They are there because they help clarify a moment, a technique, or a way of thinking about Roman food, not because a chapter needs a certain number of dishes.
The goal was to write a book you read like a narrative and return to as a reference. You can cook from it, absolutely, but you can also understand why Roman food looks the way it does, why certain flavors dominate, and why some ideas about “authenticity” collapse under scrutiny. It is less about mastering a repertoire and more about learning how to read the city through what it eats.
SS: How would you sum up an ideal day in Rome? What’s on your schedule?
KP: It all starts with hopping on a Lime bike and pulling up to La Fiorentina across the street from the Mercato Trionfale. I slam a caffè doppio macchiato then meet guests out front for my absolute favorite food tour around the Prati and Trionfale districts that explores the food, history, culture, and urbanism. I share 3 hours with guests eating pizza at Panificio Bonci and Pizzarium, sipping craft beer at Fischio, and grazing on supplì (Eroi della Pizza) and trapizzini (Be.Re.) before wrapping it all up with gelato at Gelateria dei Gracchi. Solo I run around and shop for kitchen tools at the creatively titled shop Kitchen, interview a baker or chef for an article, engage in some aimless wandering on foot or by bicycle, then meet up with friends for vino at Latteria before dinner at Cesare al Casaletto. That’s my dream day.
SS: With so many destinations suffering from over-tourism, what are some of your tips for avoiding that? Are there still places that are mostly patronized by locals, and when is the best time to visit?
KP: Over-tourism is real, but it is also uneven. Rome gets flattened into a handful of hot spots because people follow the same playbook and the same hours. My advice is to think spatially and temporally. Walk ten minutes past the monument you came to see and keep walking. Eat lunch at two, not noon. Have dinner at nine-thirty, not seven. Go to markets early, neighborhoods late, and churches at off hours when they revert to their intended purpose instead of functioning as backdrops for content creators. There are absolutely places still patronized mostly by locals, even in the center, but they somehow fly under the radar. Residential stretches of Monteverde, parts of Ostiense away from the nightlife strip, corners of Tor Pignattara, and everyday trattorie and tavole calde near office clusters are other spaces with a super local feel. The best time to visit Rome is late fall through early spring, excluding major holidays. January and February are especially good if you don’t mind super short days.
SS: I know tradition is so important in Roman cooking, but food, cooking, and chefs constantly evolve. What’s your take on tradition vs. innovation?
KP: Tradition in Roman cooking is often touted as the foundation of the city’s cuisine, but that is a misunderstanding of how Roman food actually works. The cucina romana has always been adaptive, evolving, and shaped by necessity, migration, trade, and power. The guanciale-Pecorino Romano-black pepper-egg yolk carbonara most people defend as canon is a postwar dish that featured Swiss cheese and alliums in its earliest published recipes. Tomatoes were once foreign. Offal became central, even to Popes, because it was delicious, not just because it was affordable. Innovation only becomes a problem when it has no context, purpose, or root. We are in a moment in which many chefs, mainly dude-bros, throw things on their menus that emulate trends they don’t understand or haven’t experienced, but have absorbed on social media. I am not interested in chefs chasing trends or novelty for its own sake, but I am deeply interested in cooks who understand the grammar of Roman food well enough to bend it without breaking it. Evolution is not the opposite of tradition. It is how tradition survives.
SS: Finally, tell us why you started your own publishing company, and how that’s going?
KP: I have been writing for a very long time and never really supported myself doing so. I relied on my other jobs (consulting and private food tours in Rome, Naples, and Venice) to pay the bills. Writing cookbooks was becoming untenable. It was one thing to spend $200 more than I earned researching for a magazine article. It was another going out of pocket by several tens of thousands of dollars to produce, market, and publicize books that sold very well and enriched big publishers. I crunched some numbers and determined I could probably publish books myself and rely on the relationship I have built with readers over the past two and a half decades to support my work. I now have two solo titles—Food of the Italian Islands and Rome—that are incredibly profitable. I’m still hustling my ass off to sell the books, but I’m actually getting paid properly for my work.
An added bonus is that I get complete control over how my work looks, how it reads, and where it reaches people. Writing about Rome requires nuance, space, and rigorous fact checking, and I got tired of compressing complex stories into market friendly containers. Publishing independently lets me commission the collaborators I trust, design books that reward slow reading, and keep niche subjects alive without asking permission. It is demanding and occasionally terrifying, but it is also deeply satisfying.
Gnocchi all’Amatriciana
Potato Gnocchi with Tomato, Guanciale, and Pecorino Romano
By Katie Parla, adapted from Rome: A Culinary History, Cookbook and Field Guide to the Flavors That Built a City