table talk / By Joseph Byrd

Go Gazpacho! Get back to roots with the peasant’s soup

(Sept. 13, 2007)  An early vernacular Spanish source for gazpacho — probably 14th century — says, “Gazpacho is a dish of rustic shepherds, or those who have nothing else to eat, because it is made up of garlic, vinegar, bread and water.”

Well, gazpacho has come a long way from that. In fact, it’s come a long way from when I first made it in 1960, when none of my guests had ever heard of it. These days, however, it is fashionable, though it has gradually lost touch with its roots. I’m looking at a recipe that includes shrimp, avocado and cream cheese, and has no garlic at all. These days, evidently, anything cold with tomato can be called gazpacho.

Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein walk their dog in a village in southeastern France. Photo from the collection of University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.

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But getting no respect is hardly new for this ancient soup. In 1840, the French poet Th©ophile Gautier wrote of his Spanish journey, “All the serving men and maids had gone to the dance, and we had to be content with a mere gaspacho … a recipe which would have made the hair of Brillat-Savarin stand on end. You pour some water into a soup tureen, add a dash of vinegar, some cloves of garlic, some onions, some slices of cucumber, a few pieces of pimiento, a pinch of salt, then one cuts some bread and sets it to soak in this pleasing mixture, serving it cold. At home, a dog of any breeding would refuse this. It is the favorite dish of the Andalusians, considered highly refreshing, an opinion which strikes me as rather rash, but, strange as it may seem the first time, one ends by getting used to it and even liking it.”

The source of the dish’s name is lost in the mists of the centuries, but the root seems to mean residue (with no particular negative connotation):

caspa , fragments or flakes, as in small pieces of bread — Etruscan
caspia , apple residue — Iberian under Rome
caspu , grape residue — post-Roman Italian
gaspaille , grain residue — Old French

So it’s reasonable to assume that a room-temperature soup flavored with leftover bread and spiced only with garlic is the “mother” of modern gazpacho. And while tomatoes appeared in Spain in the 16th century, they are not always present. The venerable Alice B. Toklas Cookbook describes a particularly “suave” soup from Cordoba, containing garlic, minced cucumber, olive oil, water and cornstarch, which after cooling is enriched by two cups of heavy cream!

Among her four recipes, Toklas also cites an addictive gazpacho from Malaga with a base of veal broth. And my own gazpacho is descended from Toklas through her friend, the American composer Virgil Thomson, to whom I was amanuensis for two years in New York.

Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein walk their dog in a village in southeastern France. Photo from the collection of University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.

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