Salmorejo Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Salmorejo is a thick, cold soup in which bread and tomato are ground together with olive oil, garlic and vinegar until smooth and emulsified. It grew up on the tables and farms of Andalusia in southern Spain, and above all in Córdoba.

The tomato is the lead ingredient, and it is a New World crop; it reached Europe only in the sixteenth century. Its use as food was known early. In 1592 Gregorio de los Ríos, chaplain of the royal garden at Aranjuez, listed in his Agricultura de jardines the few kinds grown in Spain that ripen red and wrote that they were good for sauces. In the summer of 1608 the account book of a Seville hospital records four pounds of tomatoes bought on 20 July and two more on 17 August. But the purchases break off there, and it was a good while later that the tomato became an ordinary thing in Andalusian kitchens and was ground with bread into a red cold soup. Salmorejo settled into its standard form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, once tomatoes had begun to redden the daily table.

Bread, olive oil and garlic have all long been at home here. The bread is ground with garlic, oil and vinegar and worked until it dissolves, and that working gives the soup its dense, almost drinkable body. The tomato came later, the bright new lead added to that worked bread.

Several accounts of how salmorejo came to be are tangled together.

One account, put forward by a member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Gastronomy, is what is called the aliño-evolution view: the dish grew out of an aliño, a base sauce of water, vinegar, salt and oil, and shifted to the red cold soup once the tomato became available. Another account looks to the Alentejo region of Portugal for the prototype, holding that Spanish prisoners freed after the Battle of Montes Claros in 1665 carried it home to Córdoba. It leans on the closeness to Portuguese cold sauces that emulsify bread and garlic, such as the Alentejo açorda, but there is little independent primary evidence for it, and it has not converged with the aliño account.

The history of the word salmorejo itself is the useful clue here. The word is in print by 1745 at the latest, in Juan de Altamiras's cookbook Nuevo arte de cocina. But what it names there is not a red cold tomato soup. Take the year the word turns up in writing as the birth year of the dish and you misplace the era. The salmorejo we know settled into shape only after the tomato had established itself on Spanish tables in the eighteenth century.

The most colourful account is the story of two thousand years of unbroken evolution, told in Córdoba's local and tourist settings. It runs in a single line: from the Roman moretum, through the Moorish-era mazamorra cordobesa, a white cold dish with almonds, to the red salmorejo that followed the tomato's arrival. In this telling, moretum is a paste of bread, garlic, oil and vinegar ground together in a mortar.

Open the poem "Moretum" attributed to Virgil, though, and what goes into the stone mortar to be pounded with the pestle is garlic, celery leaves, rue and coriander, salt, and a hard, well-salted cheese. A few drops of olive oil and a little vinegar are poured over, the mixture is worked again, and it is gathered into a single ball. The bread is kneaded and baked on the hearth separately and simply brought out at the end to go with it; it never goes into the mortar. What the poem shows is that Rome had a way of pounding garlic, herbs and cheese in a mortar and binding the paste with oil and vinegar. It does not describe a cold dish with bread dissolved into it, and no source shows the Roman technique carried on unbroken down to salmorejo. The story of a dish called salmorejo lasting two millennia has the strong colour of a pedigree rewritten later by local pride. The red tomato dish was born in the modern era, once the tomato had taken root in this land.