This a cold soup that is very close to Gazpacho but it’s thickened with bread so it’s heartier. It also doesn’t use a medley of vegetables, just tomatoes, bread, and garlic. You top it with ham (it is Spanish, after all) and chopped hard-boiled egg. This recipe, I find, serves two, but we are big men with appetites to match. This makes for pretty good leftovers. Give not a drop of this to the Ravenous Hound; he will have to content himself with some ham.

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3 lbs. of ripe tomatoes, peeled and cored. This is a PITA. An easy way to peel tomatoes is to let them simmer for a bit, covered, for about three minutes, and then “shock” them by plopping them in ice water. You should be be able to hold them and peel/push the skin away with your thumbs. I use Roma (plum) tomatoes, which means maximum peeling and coring, but not as bad as if I used cherry tomatoes. Roma/plum tomatoes have fewer seeds. I wouldn’t try to reduce the workload by using beefsteak tomatoes, because they are less flavorful, and the tomatoes have to do the heavy lifting with this. You can also buy canned/jarred peeled tomatoes but I made this as time-consuming as possible.

Scooped out bread from a good hero roll or a baguette, something like that. You need about 1 foot of roll/baguette, and you don’t want to use the crust. The more bread you use the thicker your Salmorejo will be.

2 or 3 cloves of garlic, peeled but not chopped

A little sherry vinegar or red wine vinegar. In Spain Jerez, the city that gave us “sherry,” a corruption of Jerez, also makes its own sherry vinegar so you can use that if you can find some.

A little salt

1 cup of Spanish olive oil. Any decent olive oil will do but if your supermarket has Spanish olive oil use that.

3 hard-boiled eggs, 2 of which should be diced into interesting cubes. Picasso was a Cubist (he was many things) and he was a native of Málaga, in Andalusia, and that’s where this recipe originated.

Small shaved slices of jamón ibérico or Serrano ham or, quite frankly, any ham you have access to, but try to get a rich, meaty one. You can omit this and this will be vegetarian.

Put the tomatoes in a blender for about 30 seconds to a minute until they break apart but stop before you get to a purée state. Add the bread and let it absorb the tomato for about five minutes. This is when you pour yourself a “copa de Rioja” (a glass of Rioja red wine.)

Thus fortified, add the garlic, vinegar, and salt, and set the blender a-blend until everything is creamy. Now slowly add the olive oil with your blender on medium. Add 1 whole hard-boiled egg and blend again. Your poor blender.

Put this in the fridge for a while so you can serve it cold. Divide into two large bowls. Top with your Cubist eggs and some of the ham, and while you’re at it top the Ravenous Hound’s bowl with some of the ham so he can have kibble a la español.

A Bonus:

For dessert, you can serve one of the simplest desserts, Mel i Mato. This is a Catalonian favorite. Traditionally, you take a scoop of mato (mató in Castilian) but you can get very close with ricotta. Make this into a little mound and top with some roasted walnuts or almonds. Over this spoon honey (the “Mel”), as much as you want. This is very delicious.