STAFFORD. I should say at the outset that I have standing here. I spent a year in Andalusia and I ate this soup most days from June onward, and I can tell you what it is. Ripe tomatoes, two pounds. A cucumber, peeled. Half a green pepper. One clove of garlic, no more, or you will taste nothing else for a day. A cup of bread, at least a day old, soaked in water and squeezed nearly dry. Sherry vinegar. Good oil, streamed in at the end so it emulsifies and the whole thing lightens two shades. Salt early, and let it sit, because the salt is what pulls the juice out of the tomato.

That is the soup. It is four hundred years old and it was invented by people who had bread going hard and tomatoes going soft and no intention of wasting either.

MILTON. The version that reached me is wrong on three counts and I want to go through them. There is no pepper in it. The bread is not soaked. The vinegar is balsamic.

STAFFORD. Then with respect, it is not gazpacho, it is a cold tomato soup with bread in it. The pepper is the green note — it is what keeps the thing from tasting like a sauce. The soak is how you control the bread; dry bread will take whatever it wants and you lose the texture. And sherry vinegar is not a preference, it is the regional character of the dish. Balsamic is a different country.

MILTON. I want to stay on the bread, because that is the one that matters. You soak the bread in water. Then you squeeze the water out. Then you put it in a soup. What you have done is teach the bread to drink, and then handed it a glass of water first.

Put it in dry. There is water in the tomatoes. It will find it. The difference is that it comes out tasting of tomato instead of tasting of nothing, and the body is the same, and you have not dirtied a bowl.

STAFFORD. That is fair, and I am going to give it to you, which I did not expect to be doing. The soaking step exists because the classical version is stretching two pounds of tomatoes into six servings. If you are not stretching, you do not need it. I am not giving you the vinegar.

MILTON. You do not have to. Here is where the soup came from.

It was made in Andalusia by people with hard bread. It was carried to a house in Guatemala City by a woman from Chile, who made it there for years, in a kitchen that did not have sherry vinegar in it. Someone learned it from her in that kitchen, brought it to a city in New England, and has made it since.

Somewhere on that trip it lost a green pepper and gained a different vinegar. Nobody was being careless. Each of those was a decision made by a person standing in a kitchen looking at what was in front of them, which is the only way anyone has ever cooked.

STAFFORD. And it is still recognizably the soup.

MILTON. It is better than the soup. It is sweeter, it is rounder, there is no raw green edge, and the bread tastes like what it was blended with. Four hundred years of people improving a thing by not having the correct ingredient.

THE METHOD. Two pounds of ripe tomatoes, cored. One cucumber, peeled and seeded. One clove of garlic. A cup of day-old bread, torn, dry. Two tablespoons of balsamic. A teaspoon of salt. Put all of it in the blender and leave it ten minutes so the salt works. Blend until smooth, then stream in a third of a cup of olive oil with the motor running until the colour lifts. Thin with cold water to where you want it. Chill four hours; it needs to be properly cold and it rounds out as it sits.

No pepper. Do not soak the bread.