Cold bread porridge (before tomato gazpacho) Period COrigin theory CVerified

Say "gazpacho" today and a cold red tomato soup comes to mind. But an older, white layer lies behind it, a cold bread pottage with no tomato at all. Here we turn to that white layer. The setting is Andalusia in southern Spain. The dish is said to have been refined in the south under Moorish rule in al-Andalus, and one theory traces it further back, to Roman times.

Stale bread served as the main ingredient, joined by garlic, olive oil, vinegar, water, and salt. Each was a long-established Mediterranean staple, present in the gardens and kitchens of the region since Roman times and on the everyday table from early on.

The making was plain. In a stone mortar the stale bread was ground, then loosened smooth with water and oil. In the fierce heat of Andalusia this became a daily food that slaked the thirst and filled the bellies of country folk and laborers.

One confusion is worth heading off. What is old is the genre of a cold bread pottage without tomato, not the red gazpacho now stacked on supermarket shelves. The two are separate stories.

The most widely repeated account of the name gazpacho holds that it comes from an Arabic word for "soaked bread" and reaches back to the Moorish culture of southern Spain. The idea has a pleasing ring, and it has been written and rewritten in cookbooks and guidebooks.

But it has a decisive hole: no one can produce the Arabic word it is supposed to come from. As the etymological dictionary Etymonline points out, this "Arabic origin" story appears only in the nineteenth century, and it spread without ever once naming the original word. What linguists actually put forward is the Latin caccabaceus (from Santamaría Hernández, a word for the bread used in pot-cooked dishes, found in Tertullian and Zeno of Verona), the Spanish caspa ("dandruff," from Roberts), and the medieval Latin gaspaleum (chaff of grain), and as an etymology the Arabic account is set aside. Santamaría Hernández herself, though, concludes that, on this etymology, the heir to the original dish is the hot, cooked La Mancha type, and that the cold gazpacho made with water and vinegar probably took the name in the Middle Ages. Even if the name is Latin, it is no sign that a cold soup existed in Roman times.

What, then, of the dish itself in Roman times? The evidence most often cited for a Roman pedigree is moretum. In the poem Moretum, attributed to Virgil, garlic, herbs, salt, and a hard cheese are pounded in a mortar, then olive oil and vinegar are poured in and the whole is worked into a single mass. The bread is baked separately and set alongside; it never goes into the mortar. The poem shows that pounding garlic in a mortar and binding it with oil and vinegar was known in Rome, but moretum is not a dish of ground bread, and it lends no support to a Roman cold bread pottage. A dish of a similar type appears instead in the Roman cookbook that goes under the name of Apicius. Called sala cattabia, it is a cold dish in which bread is soaked in posca (vinegar and water), while garlic, oil, and water, along with cheese, honey, and other things, are combined in a mortar; it is served topped with snow. Rome, then, did have a cold dish of a similar type. But no source shows that it crossed to Spain and led without a break to gazpacho.

White gazpacho without tomato can be found in eighteenth-century cookbooks. The capón de galera in Juan de la Mata's Arte de repostería (1747) combines bread with anchovy bones, garlic, vinegar, sugar, salt, and olive oil, and has no tomato. Ajoblanco, the white gazpacho made with almonds, is also said to appear in Juan Altamiras's Nuevo arte de cocina (1745). Both show the white shape of the prehistory.

Did the dish then owe nothing to the Moors? Not necessarily. That the name is not Arabic does not rule out the theory that the dish was refined in the al-Andalus era. By that account, the old bread pottage took in almonds under Moorish rule in the south and was refined into ajoblanco, the white gazpacho. Almond growing, too, is said to have taken root here under Moorish rule, from the eighth century on.

And a last boundary: the red tomato entered this bread pottage to make the gazpacho of today only in the nineteenth century. What is old is the genre of a cold bread pottage without tomato, not the red bowl now on the refrigerated shelf. Set the tale about the name aside, and this plain fact is what is left.