Chilled soups and an old cookbook

For outsiders, Andalucía is synonymous with gazpacho, that chilled vegetable soup that cools the system at high noon So was Ziryab’s imposition of soup as a first course the genesis of sopas frías (cold soups)? Or did they stem from the Roman legionnaires who, it is said, existed on posca, a cocktail of vinegary wine, garlic, salt, stale bread, and wild herbs plucked from the wayside? Of course gazpacho as we know it came much later, once tomato and peppers had cruised across the Atlantic from the New World, but it was the Moors who concocted ajoblanco (crushed almond, water, and garlic soup) and its denser Cordoban cousin, mazamorra, in which breadcrumbs replaced almonds. With the addition of tomatoes, this evolved into today’s much-loved emulsion, salmorejo, and the regional variant called porra. But what other dishes came? And what remained after the Christian “ethnic cleansing” of the culinary arts, as author Paul Richardson has put it?