There are many gazpacho recipes, and not all of them use tomato, even though such an idea still terrifies some. And we are not talking about modernity, but about traditional dishes that were made when the tomato had not yet conquered half the world. You just have to get hold of old recipe books to see how the kitchen evolves and be less intransigent with our dishes. The chef Jose Andres He knows it, and that’s how he discovered a gazpacho recipe written in the 19th century by an American author.
And it’s not just any recipe: it’s the first written recipe and published gazpacho with tomato. The historian and culinary expert Ana Vega biscayenne it I shared years ago on Twitter and José Andrés himself confirmed it.
The said work is ‘The Virginia Housewife, Or, Methodical Cook’of Mrs Mary Randolph and whose first edition was published in the year 1824. It is the first book of regional american cuisine aimed at housewives of the time, collecting typical recipes and ingredients from the State of Virginia, but also including references to African, European and Asian cultures. It was an immediate success and had numerous reissues over the following decades, influencing the configuration of the southern cooking that has evolved to this day, deeply multicultural.
And among those dishes from abroad, Rudolph made known the Spanish gazpacho, or a primitive gaspacho whose elaboration is still maintained in some areas of our country, especially in towns and traditional food houses. It’s a bit the rustic versionalso known as gazpacho campero, born when there were no mixerskitchen robots or Thermomixes.
The short recipe goes like this:
Put some soft biscuit or toasted bread in the bottom of a sallad bowl, put in a layer of sliced tomatoes with the skin taken off, and one of sliced cucumbers, sprinkled with pepper, salt, and chopped onion; do this until the bowl is full; Stew some tomatoes quite soft, strain the juice, mix in some mustard, oil, and water, and pour over it; make it two hours before it is eaten.
What translated into our language becomes:
“Put some bagels [biscuit, una masa típica sureña americana entre galleta y panecillo rápido hojaldrado] or toasted bread in the bottom of a salad bowl, layer skinless sliced tomatoes and cucumbers sliced, sprinkled with pepper, salt and chopped onion; do this until the container is full; cook some very soft tomatoes, strain the juice, mix a little mustard, oil and water, and pour it on top; do it two hours before eating it.
The use of the mustard and perhaps the pepper, plus the note to add the juice of a few cooked tomatoes, but you have to remember that in those days this vegetable would probably need some extra help to get all its juices and flavor out. By not crushing the ingredients, adding the juice of the cooked tomatoes would help to give a better soup consistency.
Chef Jose Andres has confessed ever served this old version of gazpacho at a G8 dinner in the White Houseand he mentioned the recipe a while ago on his podcast Longer Tableswhen he shared his passion for treasuring and reading old cookbooks, which he considers “a window to the past”, such as Mary Rudolph’s, one of his favorites.
In Spain there are places that still make gazpacho without grinding it, such as the famous El Mesón de Fuencarral (Madrid), where it is mash by hand in the mortar
The Virginia Housewife: Or Methodical Cook
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