Gazpacho

Gazpacho is Andalusia's answer to a blazing summer: a cold, raw soup blended from ripe tomatoes, cucumber, green pepper, garlic, day-old bread, olive oil, sherry vinegar and a little salt. Everything is puréed and chilled, then served ice-cold, sometimes topped with diced vegetables, croutons or a swirl of oil. Bright, tangy and refreshing, it drinks almost as easily as it eats.

Because nothing is cooked, its quality lives or dies on the produce — sun-ripened tomatoes and good olive oil are non-negotiable. Thicker, creamier cousins such as salmorejo and the pale, almond-based ajoblanco belong to the same family, and a bowl of gazpacho often sits within a wider spread of Spanish small plates alongside dishes like patatas bravas.

Gazpacho's roots run deep in southern Spain and long predate the tomato. Its ancestor was a simple field mixture of bread, olive oil, garlic, vinegar and water, pounded in a wooden bowl — a filling, cooling ration for farm labourers under the Andalusian sun, with echoes of the bread-and-oil traditions left by Roman and Moorish Iberia.

Tomatoes and peppers only entered the recipe after they arrived from the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, giving gazpacho its familiar red colour. Once a poor man's food, it climbed the social ladder in the twentieth century and, aided by the electric blender, became a fixture of Spanish summers and a symbol of Mediterranean eating exported around the world.