Remains of the Day: This gazpacho is as pale and cool as summer shade

On certain summer days, when the broad, green leaves of my walnut trees are bouncing to the rhythm of a breeze I can't even feel, and the pale, yellow light is held captive in the paper-thin petals of my Oriental poppies, I think about gazpacho.

If I were not hypnotized by the droning insects and the cool, purple haze of the lavender in bloom, I would rush to the store and buy some sweet onions and a cucumber or two, and I would make a batch of the chilled Spanish soup in time for an early supper. For summer here is short, and if I'm not careful and quick, I'll miss my window of opportunity. Gazpacho weather doesn't last too long in the Great Pacific Northwest.

But gazpacho season is no time to rush anything. I'd rather lie in the soft, green shade and think about gazpacho before I rush off to the store and buy the ingredients to make it. When the weather is warm, I'm not all that hungry. Besides, if I went too quickly, I might fall into that tomato-filled trap where all gazpacho is red — and I don't want red gazpacho. I want it as pale and cool as the shade under my walnut trees.

Gazpacho has been made with tomatoes for so long that few people think of it as anything other than chilled tomato soup. But long before tomatoes came to Spain, Spaniards were making gazpacho. What, if not tomatoes, was it made with? The answer lies partly in the origins of the word. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, gazpacho is "a chilled soup made with chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, peppers and herbs." The word is "Spanish, probably of Mozarabic origin; akin to Spanish caspicias, remainders, worthless things."

The base of this classic soup used to be the hard remainders of bread left over from days gone by. Like the Italian bread salad panzanella, gazpacho was originally a way of getting a little extra mileage out of stale bread. And just as Italians soaked the stale bread in water before tossing it with vinegar and oil, onions and herbs, so the Spanish cooks who made gazpacho in pre-Colombian times made the bread into a kind of salad.

When Spanish explorers brought fiery red tomatoes home from the New World, the gazpacho bowl was among the first places the new fruits landed. Even in the New World when Spanish settlers were setting up housekeeping in Florida, gazpacho was made with stale bread and tomatoes. Cheryl Alters Jamison & Bill Jamison provide a good recipe for Pensacola Gaspachee in their wonderful collection called "American Food."

On the Gulf Coast where my mother raised my five siblings and me, she used to make big bright bowls of gaspachee. The bread was always hardtack, the sea biscuits that resemble giant unsalted saltines. She soaked them in water, squeezed out the excess water and tossed the bread with tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, vinegar, oil and salt. As a child, I thought it was some kind of torture to have to eat bread salad; only now, seen in the golden aura of memory and a better understanding of where I was, does that bread soup/salad seem good to me.

In most places, the bread was left out of gazpacho long ago; red peppers came in, and the dish that was half salad, half soup became altogether soup. In recent years, the soup has become almost more like a cocktail. Indeed, one gazpacho featured in "The Best American Recipes, 2001-2002" is described in the head notes as a cross between a bloody Mary and a martini. "Brasserie Gazpacho," from chef Luc Dimnet, sounds delicious but as far removed from my idea of gazpacho as a zebra from a mule.

Of course there's nothing wrong with gazpacho morphing into a red cocktail. That kind of thing happens all the time. Food changes. But there is something to be said for pre-Colombian green or white gazpacho, too. Norman Van Aken, the Miami chef who almost single-handedly reinvented Florida cuisine at the end of the last century, makes a smooth white gazpacho with stale bread, blanched almonds and coconut milk. He calls it Gazpacho "B.C." Put it beside Luc Dimnet's red cocktail and you would be hard-pressed to call them variations on the same soup.

"B.C.," says Van Aken, refers to "before Columbus . . . gazpachos were created centuries before the good capitán sailed back to Spain with a fruit the Indians called tomatl." It also refers to "its ancient and holy ability to feed. With bread, oil, vinegar and garlic, the foundations of all gazpachos are laid." Finally, B.C. stands for "Beautiful Coconut," which sums up Van Aken's New World Florida-style gazpacho.

My white gazpacho is less adventurous perhaps than Van Aken's, but it is loyal to the same precepts, that gazpacho is older than we are and that it should have bread and oil and vinegar at its roots. And I think it can be more gratifying without the ubiquitous tomato.

That said, get out from under the walnut tree and do your shopping. Buy bread and oil and vinegar, if those things aren't already in the house. Buy onions and cucumbers, white grapes and almonds. But skip the tomatoes.

White Gazpacho
Makes about 1 quart

2 cups loosely packed French bread cubes, crusts removed
2 cups water
1 sweet onion (about 1/2 pound), peeled and chopped
2 medium cucumbers, peeled and roughly chopped
1/2 cup champagne vinegar
1/4 cup almond or olive oil
3 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon white pepper

For the garnish:

1/2 pound green grapes, stemmed, rinsed and split in half
1/2 cup sliced almonds, toasted

1. Put the bread and water in a blender with the onion, cucumber, vinegar, oil, sugar, salt and white pepper and purée until perfectly smooth.

2. Chill the soup for a couple of hours or until it is very cold. Serve it in cold bowls with split green grapes and toasted almonds for garnish.

Greg Atkinson is executive chef at Canlis and chef at the Puget Sound Environmental Center. He is also author of "The Northwest Essentials Cookbook" (Sasquatch Books, 1999).