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Caspacho
(A national dish of Spain.) Mince a large white onion, add 1 fine cucumber sliced, and 3 tomatoes cut up. Put in layers in a bowl, dust with salt, pepper, parsley, and bread-crumbs, adding oil and vinegar as for salad. There must be plenty of the latter, and the whole served ice-cold. This is the most popular summer dish in Spain.
This is gazpacho in its older, unblended form — a chopped salad soaked in oil, vinegar and its own juices rather than a smooth cold soup. The instructions are terse, so a few decisions are left to the cook.
- The hinge: let it sit coldThe dish only works once the salted vegetables have wept and the bread has swelled into the oil and vinegar. An hour in the refrigerator, minimum; two is better. Served straight after assembling it is just dressed vegetables.
- Bread-crumbs mean stale breadHere this meant crumbs torn or grated from a dry loaf, not the fine dried packaged crumbs sold today. Use a couple of handfuls from a stale country loaf, crust removed; packaged crumbs turn to paste.
- QuantitiesNo amounts are given for oil and vinegar. As a starting point, about 1/3 cup olive oil for this quantity of vegetable, with a sharp wine vinegar added to taste — the recipe is emphatic that there must be plenty of vinegar, so expect to go well beyond a standard salad ratio.
- Salt the layers as you goDusting each layer, as written, matters more than it sounds: the salt draws liquid from the tomato and cucumber, and that liquid is the broth. Salting only the top leaves the lower layers bland and dry.
- Tomatoes and cucumberReckon on about 1 lb of ripe tomatoes for the three called for. Peel and seed the cucumber if it is a thick-skinned supermarket variety, or use a Persian or English one.
- OnionA large white onion raw is assertive by modern taste. Slicing it thinly and rinsing it in cold water for ten minutes takes the harsh edge off without losing the point of it.
- Garlic, absentMost Spanish versions of this dish use garlic; this one does not. A crushed clove rubbed round the bowl is one way to suggest it if you want it.
- YieldServes four as a first course or light lunch. Serve it genuinely cold, in chilled bowls, with the accumulated liquid spooned over.
Gazpacho belongs to a family of Andalusian dishes built on bread, oil, vinegar, salt and water, a peasant preparation that long predates the tomato's arrival in Spanish kitchens. The earliest forms were pounded in a mortar and were white or pale, thickened with bread and sometimes almonds; the tomato-and-pepper version familiar today spread through the nineteenth century as those crops became cheap and ubiquitous in the south. What is notable about this version is that it is not pureed at all: the whirring of gazpacho into a smooth pink soup is largely a twentieth-century development that followed the electric blender into Spanish and then American homes. On the page it carries only the parenthetical note "(A national dish of Spain.)" — a household staple of the Andalusian summer arriving framed as a curiosity.