Gazpacho Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Gazpacho is an Andalusian cold soup of raw vegetables ground together with water and oil worked in. The red of the tomato feels self-evident today, but the dish has an older shape: a cold bread pottage of bread, garlic, oil, vinegar, and water, ground and mixed, with no tomato. It was a plain food that the people of the region ate day after day.

That older form survives in the record. Arte de repostería, written in 1747 by Juan de la Mata, a confectioner of the Madrid royal household, gives a capón de galera as "the most common gazpacho": crusts of bread soaked in water and dressed with a sauce of anchovy bones, garlic, vinegar, sugar, salt, and oil. There is no tomato in it. This one book tells us that the gazpacho of the mid-eighteenth century was not yet red.

What turned this cold bread pottage red was the tomato, come from the New World. No record tells when tomatoes were first brought into Spain, but by the end of the sixteenth century their use as food was known. In his Agricultura de jardines of 1592, Gregorio de los Ríos listed the kinds grown in Spain that ripen red and wrote that they were good for sauces. The account books of a Seville hospital record two purchases in the summer of 1608: four pounds of tomatoes on 20 July and two pounds on 17 August. The record of buying ends there.

More than a century later, by the mid-eighteenth century, the tomato had entered the Spanish kitchen — de la Mata's book has an entry for Spanish-style tomato sauce — yet the gazpacho in that same book has no tomato. The kitchen put tomatoes in its sauces, while its gazpacho still tasted of bread and vinegar. Gazpacho appears in print in its red form in the nineteenth century. The 1830 edition of The Virginia House-Wife, an American cookbook by Mary Randolph, has an entry headed "Gaspacho—Spanish": peeled, thinly sliced tomatoes and cucumbers are layered over bread, and tomato juice, cooked and strained, is poured over them to make a red gazpacho. The entry is said to have been there since the first edition of 1824.

So two eras lie stacked in gazpacho. At the bottom is the old cold bread pottage, made from stale bread and everyday seasonings. On top of it sits the tomato from the New World, changing its color and its taste. It is a soup rooted in its land, eaten at the everyday tables of Andalusia's ordinary people.

Gazpacho is easily taken for an ancient Spanish tradition. The most widely told version has the word gazpacho coming from an Arabic term for "soaked bread," and the soup itself reaching back to Moorish food culture. But this etymology has nothing solid to stand on.

According to the etymological dictionary Etymonline and to linguistic study, the "gazpacho = Arabic soaked bread" account is a claim traced to nineteenth-century sources, and it has been repeated without ever naming the Arabic word it supposedly comes from. The derivations scholars actually put forward—Latin caccabaceus, Spanish caspa (for the look of breadcrumbs), the Mozarabic suffix -acho—are none of them Arabic. The Arabic etymology, then, cannot serve as evidence of an Arab origin.

Even so, how far back the pre-tomato cold bread pottage reaches is not yet settled. One view has the Romans bringing a cold soup of bread, olive oil, vinegar, and water. Another ties it to the food culture of al-Andalus under Moorish rule, and points to ajoblanco, a white soup thickened with almonds, as a sister dish. The etymological support has collapsed, but the argument from this cultural connection remains, separate from the etymology. Both views accept that the older layer is old; they remain side by side, one placing its origin with Rome and the other with the Arabs.

Two questions need to be kept apart here. Whether the old pottage goes back to Rome or comes from the Arabs is one; when red gazpacho came into being is another. Two books answer the second. De la Mata's of 1747 has only a gazpacho without tomato; Randolph's 1830 edition (said to carry the entry from the first edition of 1824) records a red one. However old the older layer may be, there is no doubt that today's tomato-red gazpacho came into being, together with the New World tomato, between the 1747 book and the 1830 edition.