Slice 2 cucumbers, 2 tomatoes, 1 onion and two green peppers. Then sprinkle with 1 chopped clove of garlic, salt and pepper and cover with some thin slices of bread. Pour over all a cup of vinegar and ¼ cup of olive-oil and serve.
July 8 — No. 8
Portuguese
A raw vegetable salad dressed with vinegar and oil over bread — essentially an unblended gazpacho, and it behaves like one. The bread is the hinge: it is there to soak up the vinegar and vegetable juice, so use something that can take the liquid.
- The breadThin slices of a firm, open-crumbed country loaf, ideally a day or two old. Soft modern sandwich bread collapses into paste within minutes. Some cooks tear it into pieces and toss it through rather than laying it over the top.
- Let it standThe recipe says to serve at once, but the dish is better after 20-30 minutes in the refrigerator, by which time the salt has drawn juice from the tomatoes and cucumbers and the bread has softened. Beyond about two hours the cucumber goes limp and watery.
- The vinegar is a lotA full cup of vinegar to a quarter cup of oil is far more vinegar than modern taste expects. With modern 5% wine vinegar, start with a quarter cup and add more to taste; keep the oil at a quarter cup or increase it.
- Peppers"Green peppers" here means sweet bell peppers, not chillies. Two whole ones for this quantity is generous; core and remove the ribs, and slice thin.
- Salt the vegetables firstSalting the sliced cucumber and tomato before dressing them, then draining off a little of the liquid, keeps the salad from turning to soup.
- Onion and garlicOne raw onion is assertive. A mild sweet or red onion, sliced paper-thin and rinsed briefly in cold water, sits better with the rest. The clove of garlic can be rubbed over the bread instead of chopped through the salad if you want it softer.
- YieldServes four as a first course or side, two as a light summer lunch with cheese.
Bread, oil, vinegar and whatever the garden gave up in July is one of the oldest patterns in Iberian cooking — the family that includes Spanish gazpacho and salmorejo and Portuguese açorda and gaspacho alentejano, the last of which is still made in the Alentejo as a cold, chunky, garlic-heavy bread and vegetable dish rather than a smooth purée. The instruction to lay bread over the vegetables and pour vinegar over the lot is closer to those rustic versions than to anything blended. This page comes from a calendar cookbook that assigns each day a dish from a different country, and such national labels were often loose; tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers dressed with oil and vinegar would have read as convincingly foreign to an American household while asking nothing of the cook but a knife.