Lina’s gazpacho, recipe not included

When I lived in Spain, I was lucky enough to have found a friend in Lina, who helped us with, among her many other amazing talents, entertaining guests by cooking regional specialities from her native Andalucía. She was always happy to share but unfortunately, she never referred to recipes. I briefly believed that I’d found a way around this: she could make the dish with me and I would simply write down the details. The following is my attempt to transcribe her recipe for gazpacho.

“Bueno, we will make gazpacho together,” Lina said. I’d asked her for a list of ingredients. In response, she put all the ingredients out on the kitchen counter alongside a large hand-blown glass jug.

I expected to write a traditional recipe, starting with a precise list of ingredients and measurements, but Lina was already starting while I quickly scribbled what was there.

• One baguette

• Eight medium-sized red tomatoes

• One large green (bell) pepper

• Half a cucumber, peeled

• One clove of garlic

• Salt

• White wine vinegar

• Olive oil

“You start with a large piece of bread,” she said. She tore off about a third of the baguette.

“Wait, how large? I need to weigh it!” I grabbed the piece of bread. It was about 60 grams. She snatched it back, rolling her eyes.

“You don’t need to measure. You just need to taste.” She ripped the bread into rough pieces and dropped them into the jug. “It’s just a bit of this and a bit of that. But what you need to do is break everything into pieces so it is easier to purée.” She chopped the pepper and cucumber without a chopping board, just holding them in the air and quickly slicing so the pieces fell into the jug.Then, with all fingers apparently still intact, she started cutting tomatoes in half and dropping them in.

“Don’t you need to cut out the core?”

“No, we’ll strain it later. Just throw everything in.” She cut more tomatoes into the jug until it was full. “Now we make room.” She got out an old electric mixer with a liquidizer attachment. The tomatoes rapidly retreated before the bladed onslaught.

“Is that safe? Maybe it would be better to use a normal blender?” There was one standing in the corner of the counter.

She wrinkled her nose. The contents of the jug had already reduced to half-full. “I guess you could.” She shrugged with a why would you? look and cut in the rest of the tomatoes. Then she added a single garlic clove.

Lina loves garlic. Once we had a guest for lunch who didn’t like onions and garlic, so I asked Lina if she might cook an Andalucían dish for him without any alliums. “No,” she said. Not in a rude way: she just couldn’t imagine how that would work. Garlic is life. The surprise must have shown on my face because she smiled reassuringly. “In this case, we only use a little garlic, so that it doesn’t overpower the flavor. But we will add onions for serving.”

I scrawled her advice as quickly as I could but when I glanced up, she was already putting the salt away. “Wait! How much?”

“A lot.” She picked up the vinegar.

“Could I use Worcester sauce?”

She paused. “What’s that?”

“It’s a condiment.” My voice faltered under her gaze. “It tastes salty.”

“Just use salt! The tomatoes are sweet and they need plenty of salt.”

“What about celery salt?”

Her face flushed as she took a deep breath.

I backed down. “OK, OK. Normal salt.” Gazpacho, not a Bloody Mary.

“Now oil and vinegar!” She moved on quickly, hoping to stall any further brainstorming on my part. “And don’t ask me how much! You simply add as much as you like.” She paused. “But, you must make sure that it is more oil than vinegar.” She poured quickly from both bottles.

I bit my lip and wrote “1 big glug vinegar, 2 bigger glugs of olive oil”. She picked up the immersion blender again.

“Blend it for a very long time.” She raised her voice over the buzzing blades.”It should be very smooth. When you think you are done, blend it some more.” The red liquid spun in the jug as the immersion blender rose and fell. Small drops splattered the kitchen tiles.

Lina scowled at the splatters. “It’s not red enough.” There were more tomatoes in the fridge for just such an occasion. She added two and then laughed and threw in a third. “More won’t hurt. The tomatoes are the most important ingredient.” She paused to look at me. “Write that down. Without the tomatoes, you have nothing.” She ran the blender for a few more minutes before pulling it out to watch the liquid drip back into the jug. “Better. Now taste.” She handed me a spoon.

The small spoonful filled my mouth with flavor: sweet and acidic and salty and a little bit spicy. There was a taste of onions or something similarly sharp, even though I knew she hadn’t added any. It tasted like summer. “It’s wonderful,” I said, amazed.

“More vinegar?” She already had the bottle in her hand.

“I don’t think so.”

With a frown, she took the spoon from me. “More vinegar.” She added the tiniest of dashes before tasting again. “Fine. It’s not bad. Now we need a sieve and a very large bowl.”

She emptied the jug, passing the liquid through a fine-meshed sieve, pressing it through with a wooden spoon. She dropped her voice into a whisper, as if telling me a secret. “You can add some water to make it lighter. I do that sometimes. Or ice. Fill the jug with ice before you put the soup back in.”

She poured the strained liquid back into the jug and held it out to me.”And that’s it! You can drink it from the glass or serve it in a bowl. I like it in a bowl, so you can mix things in. Fry the rest of the bread in olive oil to make croutons.” A brief pause to make sure I was getting everything down. “Also, onion, pepper and cucumber, chopped fine. Even chopped fresh tomato, if you like. But serve them separately, so each person can put the toppings on the soup and start eating before they sink.

I leaned over the jug and inhaled the red scent of tomato. “How many does it serve?”

Her face was a picture of exasperation. “It depends on how much they eat,” she said, shooing me out of her kitchen. And then, relenting, she got out a glass and poured me a small portion. “Now get out; I have work to do.”

I took my messy notes and the perfect glass of gazpacho and left her in peace.