If we were to stand in the main square of any city or town in Andalusia today and ask its inhabitants what their most distinctive Andalusian dish is, the majority would almost certainly answer: gazpacho. There are few things more uniquely Andalusian than the queen of cold summer soups.

However, the first recipe we know of for this product is not Andalusian. In fact, it is not even Spanish.

So what exactly is gazpacho? Because although the success of the “Andalusian gazpacho” in recent years is indisputable, the Spanish geography has been full of gazpachos and gazpachuelos that are very different from the southern recipe for centuries. In fact, in the 17th century, ‘gazpacho’ meant ‘a kind of crumb made with fried bread, oil and vinegar’.

This is a traditional Spanish recipe, and there is little doubt about that. The question is when did tomatoes start to be added to the preparations?

Library of Congress – via Ana Vega

American track. We still don’t know the answer to this question, but we had some interesting clues. In 1824, an American who had never set foot in Spain published what we believe to be the first tomato gazpacho recipe in history in her book, ‘The Virginia Housewife’. Of course, she didn’t invent it. As far as we know, Mary Randolph had a family living in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and this must have had a connection to Andalusian gastronomy.

So much so that, despite its obvious differences from the current gazpacho, we believed for many years that this was the first written evidence of modern gazpacho with tomatoes. But we were wrong. As journalist and historian Ana Vega explains, there are French testimonies from 1816, 1824 and 1840, where it is stated that “the favorite dish of the Andalusians was gazpacho with bread, oil, water and tomatoes.”

So? Do we have any elders among us? Well, yes. A few years ago, Vega found an even older recipe: the Recetario Mexiquense, by Dominga de Guzmán, a New Spain woman who wrote a “home kitchen notebook” of more than 300 recipes between 1749 and 1779.

This makes perfect sense: what we find in this recipe book are dozens of Castilian preparations mixed with Mexican products. But Spanish (and European) cuisine has been exactly that for a century: a mix of products. The first recipe published in Naples appears to be for “Spanish tomato sauce.”

Does this mean that modern gazpacho is Mexican? So it’s very likely that by the time Dominga de Guzmán finished her recipe book, tomato gazpacho was something consumed on both sides of the Atlantic. Where did it first appear? The truth is, it’s a mystery, and although it’s “very likely that gazpacho with tomatoes existed in Spain in the 18th century or even earlier,” it may have actually originated independently on both sides.

So why haven’t we found a Spanish recipe? This is not strange. For example, the first written recipe for paella appears in a book published in Madrid in 1857, and no one doubts its Valencian origin.

Popular dishes from each region are usually not recorded in writing. The history of books and recipe books is the history of gastronomy of the rich and wealthy. This gives a lot of bias to such publications. Therefore, it is always more effective to look for the origins of our dishes in travel books. This is where we can find ourselves best in the eyes of others.

Image | Golden Mouth

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