‘He knows stuff about Spain we fly-by-nights can only guess at’ Guardian, UK
Recipes
GAZPACHO ANDALUZ
Three large slices day-old coarse country white bread, crusts removed
2 tablespoons sherry vinegar, or to taste
3lb (1.5kg) ripe tomatoes, peeled and seeded
Yellow onion, cut into chunks
1 cucumber, peeled, halved, seeded and cut into chunks
1 red pepper (capsicum), seeded and cut into chunks
1 cup (8 fl oz/250 ml) extra-virgin olive oil
sea salt
handful of ice cubes
for the garnish:
1 small cucumber, peeled, halved, seeded and diced
1 red pepper (capsicum)
2 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and chopped
2 slices serrano ham, finely chopped
Place two slices of the bread in a food processor and spoon the vinegar over. Then add the tomatoes, onion, the cucumber and bell pepper chunks, 2/3 cup (5 fl oz/160 ml) of the olive oil, and 1 cup (8 fl oz/250 ml) water and pulse until smooth. Add more water if desired – some people like their gazpacho thick, while others prefer a runnier consistency – and pulse again. Season to taste with salt and more vinegar, if desired.
Cover and refrigerate until well chilled, at least 2 hours or up to 4 hours.
Meanwhile, cut the remaining bread slice into _ inch (12mm) cubes. In a frying pan over medium-high heat, warm the remaining 1/3 cup (3 fl oz/90 ml) olive oil. Add the bread cubes and fry, stirring often, until golden brown on all sides, about 3 minutes. Transfer to paper towels to drain.
Just before serving, transfer the gazpacho to a serving bowl and add the ice cubes. Place the diced cucumber, diced bell pepper, hard-boiled eggs, ham, and prepared bread cubes in individual small bowls to serve as garnishes. Pass the bowls at the table for guests to top their soup as desired.
Serve with a crisp, light Spanish white wine such as Rueda or Penedés.
extract from A Late Dinner on gazpacho:
Few dishes in world cuisine are more rigorously seasonal than gazpacho. This is a dish which for most of the year is literally inconceivable, not just because the ingredients are out of season, but because the dish derives its meaning and raison d’etre from a particular time of year: the season of summer. You would no more eat an ice-cold gazpacho in the frosty month of January than you would a mighty cocido madrileño with all the trimmings in the middle of August. During winter the dish retreats into hibernation, only to emerge on one of those days in June when an early blast of summer heat takes the country by surprise, you realise that everything you need for the dish is out there in the garden, minus one or two things which can be bought at the corner shop, and suddenly gazpacho is back on the agenda - where it stays, an irreplaceable staple of summer eating, until the first chilly days of autumn once more consign it, like Persephone, to another eight months of oblivion.
There are gazpachos that stick in the mind, along with places and people and moments. The first ‘milestone gazpacho’ of my life was one I made myself. As a child I liked to cook, but more than cooking itself, what excited me was the business of planning the menu, setting the table, and creating the atmosphere around the food. I devised a series of dinners based on national themes, at which the guests were the members of my family. The Spanish dinner consisted of gazpacho and paella - naturally enough - and sliced oranges for dessert; the menu cards were typed up individually and adorned with motifs of Spanish flags, bulls’ heads and castanets around the edges. I remember nothing about the paella, though it was probably a travesty. But that gazpacho, oddly, has stayed with me. I must have whizzed it up in my Mum’s old Kenwood mixer, of the sort that required you to hold down the lid with its rubber seal or whatever you were whizzing would end up decorating the walls. It struck me then, not only as amazingly easy to make, for such a classic dish of world cuisine, but improbably delicious. Which of course it is.
No-one is quite sure of the origins of gazpacho, though the idea of a watery salad goes back a long way, perhaps predating the Romans. The word however has been traced to the Latin caspa, implying small pieces or flakes – with which the modern Spanish word for dandruff (caspa) off-puttingly shares a common root.
Until the tomato and pepper arrived in Europe, gazpacho would have been made without either. Until the 20th century this was not a well-known dish, and rarely figured in cookbooks. Angel Muro’s encyclopaedic Practicón of 1894 makes no mention of it. Perhaps Muro thought it too embarrassingly primitive a concoction to be worthy of inclusion. Yet it is odd that not a single one of the Andalucian repertoire of sopas frias makes it into his culinary Parnassus: the only cold soup to be found in the pages of the Practicon is an iced consommé, hardly representative in any sense of Spanish regional cooking.
As the influence of France faded from the Spanish culinary scene, which it had dominated for the whole of the 19th century, the excellences of traditional cooking began to be seen for what they were. For the great doctor and humanist Gregorio Marañón (1887-1960), gazpacho was an inspired piece of popular gastronomy which anticipates a series of modern ideas about healthy eating. ‘The learned folk of a few decades ago marvelled at the fact that with such a light dish, harvesters were able to toil for so many hours in the heat of the midday sun: they were unaware that the common instinct was many centuries in advance of the professors of nutrition, and that this emulsion of oil in cold water with the addition of vinegar, salt, pimenton, crushed tomato, bread and other ingredients, contains everything necessary to sustain workers engaged in the most tedious of labours’, wrote Marañón.
There are gazpachos of all colours, textures, and aromas – some of which do not even bear the name. And the king of them all, in my book, is not a gazpacho at all in any real sense. Ajoblanco (it means literally white garlic) is a soup of raw almonds with a little garlic, salt, olive oil and water. It is one of those dishes that, primitive though it sounds in theory, becomes in practice a great deal more than the sum of its parts. Ajoblanco is often eaten with the inspired accompaniment of sweet Muscat grapes or chunks of ripe melon. It is a thoroughly traditional dish, yet it could have been invented last week. Cool and ivory white, with a creaminess that leads many people to the mistaken assumption that it contains a dairy product, the ajoblanco has a minimalist modernity that belies its age-old popularity in the city of its birth.
The culinary scene in the city of Málaga is not what you might call buzzing, but there is one address at least that is often cited as a point of reference: the Café de Paris. The name is terrible, but after twenty-four years of existence and a shining reputation in the city, it must have seemed there was little point in changing it. When Jose Carlos Garcia’s’ father ran the kitchen it was famous for its French-style cooking, which ran to such things as beef Wellington and soufflé Grand Marnier. But when Jose Carlos took over, fresh from La Cónsula cookery school outside Málaga, the menu underwent a radical change.
I first went to the Café in the mid-1990s, when José Carlos had just taken over in the kitchen, but his ajoblanco malagueño with a red wine and cinnamon granizado was already a firm fixture on the menu. As a dish it made so much sense, not only because the silk and ice of soup and sorbet made for a fabulous combination, the deep red on ivory white a dazzling visual contrast, but also because it tapped into the traditions of the city, breathing new life into a recipe as old as the hills.
Now I was on my way back along the coast toward Málaga, sitting in sluggish, angry traffic on the motorway linking Cadiz and Algeciras with the Costa del Sol. I was already late for my two o´clock table, and I was also running out of gas, feeling my anxiety levels rising with the temperature inside the car.
Few times in my life have I needed more urgently a cold gazpacho, or an ajoblanco for that matter, with or without the red wine granizado. I conjured up the thought of cold, and refreshing, and relaxing, as I limped the last few miles into town, found a space in the ferocious sun beside the bull ring and dashed for the door of the restaurant.
In a matter of minutes my wish was granted. The dining room was silent, cool, and calming. The waitress brought me a gazpacho of red fruits, with marinated sardines in tight curls, and then a plate of Jose Carlos’ famous ajoblanco. Then there was red mullet in fillets, arranged on a risotto of beetroot and chives. The bold use of colour, contrast and intensity, reminded me that the city of Málaga was the birthplace of Pablo Picasso.
Ajoblanco ran, so to speak, in the family. Jose Carlos grandfather, who came originally from Rincon de la Victoria, a village a little way down the coast, had loved the dish almost to distraction. ‘He ate it with grapes and a little fresh cheese’, said the chef as we chatted in the kitchen after lunch. ‘It was his dinner, almost all year round’, he remembered.
Jose Carlos’ parents had told him about the original, rustic gazpacho, which sounds more like Marjorie Grice Hutchinson’s description of roughly crushed vegetables swimming in oil, vinegar and water than the smoothly liquidised soup of modern times.
‘My dad tells me that farming people used to eat it in the countryside as a working lunch’, he said. ‘The women would bring it out to them in a clay bowl covered with a cloth. It must have looked pretty unattractive – everything just mashed up with a fork.’
The cold soups of Andalucia have turned out to be a rich resource for the new Spanish cooking, giving rise to modern classics like malagueño chef Dani Garcia’s gazpachos of cherry (with goat’s cheese ‘snow’ and salted anchovies), of green tomato (with sliced sea snail), and his pine-nut ajoblanco. Among Ferran Adrià’s earliest inventions were a luxury gazpacho with chunks of lobster and a salmorejo of lobster and rabbit. Nowadays it is no surprise to find a designer restaurant in Madrid serving tataki of salmon on a pool of porra antequerana. The fashion has even spread to Paris, where Joel Robuchon serves a tomato-based gazpacho with fresh almonds and basil oil at his chic new restaurant L’Atelier. Sopas frias are everywhere.
As for Jose Carlos, he has taken this central plank of his culinary heritage and fashioned it into dozens of curious and interesting forms.
‘Gazpachos? I’ve made them out of everything!’ he laughed when I put to him the obvious question. One of his first variations on the traditional theme was gazpacho de fresa, replacing half the weight of tomato with the same quantity of strawberry. Raspberry works, so does cherry, and beetroot. I myself make a gazpacho with watermelon which is hauntingly sweet and subtly perfumed. Jose Carlos’ experiments have led him to try gazpacho with avocado, a thick greenish cream, and gazpacho with a garnish of roast scallops, or fried aubergines, or with marinated tuna from the almadrabas of Cadiz. His most radical creation was the gazpacho transparente, a normal gazpacho decanted and filtered again and again until nothing remained but the watery essence of the tomato and cucumber and green pepper. It was a long way from the English gazpacho of my childhood, further still from the dull tourist gazpachos of the Costa Brava - and a million miles from the harvesters with their scythes, among the dust and prickles of a cornfield in high summer, gratefully tucking into their midday meal of raw vegetables mashed in a clay bowl with vinegar, oil, salt, and water from the spring.
Place two slices of the bread in a food processor and spoon the vinegar over. Then add the tomatoes, onion, the cucumber and bell pepper chunks, 2/3 cup (5 fl oz/160 ml) of the olive oil, and 1 cup (8 fl oz/250 ml) water and pulse until smooth. Add more water if desired – some people like their gazpacho thick, while others prefer a runnier consistency – and pulse again. Season to taste with salt and more vinegar, if desired.