Chilled Soups

Traditional and Modern

Climate change is real, and the past two summers in Spain -as in many parts of the world- have been impossibly stiflingly hot. It seems like this will be the new normal.

In summer, my family eats their fill of gazpacho for the entire year. As it should be; nowadays we tend to think tomatoes are a year-round food, but they are seasonal. Taste a tomato in summer and one in winter and you will immediately understand this.

Bruno loves gazpacho for breakfast. It’s one of the few recipes my Andalusian mother-in-law makes very well (the other one is the classic potato omelet, which I adore), and come summer she is happy to oblige, so there’s a daily pitcher of gazpacho in her fridge. I included her recipe for traditional Andalusian gazpacho in The Sobremesa Cookbook, as well as another traditional tomato-based chilled soup, salmorejo from Córdoba, which I’ll take over gazpacho any day.

my mother-in-law’s gazpacho recipe from The Sobremesa Cookbook

Gazpacho’s creamier, thicker counterpart, salmorejo has a shorter ingredient list -it’s basically tomato, olive oil, bread (I use GF) and garlic- and feels more nutritious than refreshing, which is gazpacho’s main purpose.

All of the chilled soup recipes stem from Andalucía, by far the hottest part of Spain (closer to Africa than to France). Throughout history and before air conditioning or climate change, the southern population needed to find creative ways to cool their bodies down. Another trick they developed are the extremely long siestas when the sun is at its highest, go figure. You just can’t expect to get anything done in that heat.

In recent years, gazpacho has become very well-known around the world, much more so than its creamy cousin salmorejo, in fact, I wonder why. So much so that any cold soup has pretty much become some kind of “gazpacho” or other, which, purist that I can sometimes be, bothers me a bit, I must admit. I have even seen ajoblanco, a very traditional recipe, the oldest of all the chilled soups, as it pre-dates tomatoes’ arrival in Spain, called “white gazpacho”. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that, as they are related -both chilled soups, both from Andalucía- but it gets me every time.

I’ve decided to chill out -pardon the pun- and try to stop getting annoyed by modernization. After all, that is how cuisines develop, right? So in the spirit of openness to change, today I am offering you a lovely Cherry Gazpacho (yikes! I said it!) recipe I made at my recent Flavors of Andalucía class at 18 Reasons, which was much enjoyed by all. The color is spectacular, and you can choose from a wide variety of toppings to make it a slightly different eating experience if you have to have it a couple of days in a row, as we did after I made such a big batch of it. You can play with the texture and make it more watery or thicker by adjusting the amount of bread (or leaving it out entirely) and water.