Tomato, telera bread, garlic and olive oil pounded cold into a thick orange cream, poured into a shallow bowl and finished with chopped jamón and hard-boiled egg. Thicker than gazpacho, and never watered down.
Where to eat it: 4 restaurants across 1 city.
Salmorejo is the tomato descendant of mazamorra, the Roman almond-and-bread soup that Córdoba's olive workers ate cold in the fields. Tomatoes reached Spain from the Americas but took two centuries to reach the mortar; the first written record of salmorejo is in the dictionary of the Real Academia Española in 1737. The city now has a Cofradía del Salmorejo Cordobés, a brotherhood that specifies Guadalquivir tomatoes, Montalbán garlic, Córdoba telera bread and vinegar in the canonical version. What separates it from gazpacho is the ratio: far more bread, no cucumber, no pepper, and enough olive oil emulsified in to make a cream you can stand a spoon in.
Common allergens: Gluten, Egg
Tip from the editors. Use one garlic clove, not three. Córdoba salmorejo should taste of tomato and oil, with the garlic sitting well behind them.
Taberna Salinas serves salmorejo, flamenquín and fried aubergine off Córdoba's Corredera, in a barrel-lined room the Salinas family took on in 1924.
Try: Salmorejo and flamenquín
Order: Salmorejo, then flamenquines de jamón serrano.
Tip: An earlier tavern stood here from 1879; the Salinas family business itself dates from 1924.
La Salmoreteca is the salmorejo stall inside the Mercado Victoria in Córdoba, running about a dozen versions off a book that catalogues 675 of them.
Try: Salmorejo, a dozen ways
Order: The classic salmorejo first, then one of the odd ones like beetroot or squid ink.
Tip: Chef Juanjo Ruiz rewrites the stall's dozen salmorejos by season, so the odd flavours rotate.
Regadera sits on Córdoba's Ronda de Isasa with the Guadalquivir outside, Adrián Caballero cooking cordobés classics from a kitchen open to the room.
Signature: Salmorejo, Flamenquín
Order: The salmorejo, then the flamenquín, both rebuilt rather than reinvented.
Tip: The riverside tables go first at sunset, so ask for one when you book rather than on arrival.
Bodegas Campos has poured in Córdoba since 1908, a warren of patios and barrel-signed rooms off Calle Lineros serving rabo de toro and salmorejo.
Signature: Rabo de toro, Salmorejo, Flamenquín
Order: Rabo de toro, the dish the house has cooked for over a century.
Tip: Ask to walk through the barrel rooms before you sit; the signed butts are a century of visiting names.
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