An amazing Andalusian cold soup, which will bring summer and sun feeling right to your home. Top it with eggs, Jamón and crackers, and it can be a main dish, since it is quite filling. Read the story of how I found this soup here.
Start by washing your tomatoes and cutting small crosses into the skin, which will make it easier to peel later on.
Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Once the water is boiling, place the tomatoes inside for around 50 seconds. Then, remove them, and place in a cold water bath.
After the water bath, it should be easy to peel the tomatoes. Cut out the cores, removing all the seeds and place them in a blender.
Blend them for about 20-30 seconds, until there are no more chunks.
Take all of the "inside" of the baguette (no crust) and add them to the blended tomatoes. How much you add will strongly depend on your taste, I usually add all, which gives about 2-3 cups. Let the bread soak in the tomato juice for about 5 minutes.
Add the vinegar, pinch of salt, and garlic and blend until there are no more chunks and the texture is smooth. It might take a few minutes.
Now comes the fun part! Add the oil, little by little. Either by opening the small hole on top, if your blender has that, or by stopping and adding 1/4 at a time.
You should see the color of your soup changing from a beigish-orange to a brighter, beautiful orange.
And it should be pretty thick.
Now you need to be VERY patient, because this absolutely needs to be eaten cold. Put it in the fridge for at least one hour. To serve: place in a bowl with 1 chopped, hardboiled egg and sliced ham. Cry with delight and solomny vow to make it on a regular basis.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of those words that is thrown around by everybody and their grandmother these days. If I were to ask you what is AI, what would your answer be? Perhaps you would recall some movies you may have watched, such as Terminator, Her, or Ex Machina, and say AI is one of those evil things that will take over the world and kill people one moment or another.
Or, perhaps, you would take a less apocalyptic, sci-fi approach and say, well, it is human intelligence demonstrated by machines. Next I would ask you, and what is intelligence? Then you would perhaps answer, well, intelligence is a wishy-washy concept (in fact, intelligence has long been studied by psychologists, sociologists, biologists, neuroscientists, or philosophers, leading to over 70 definitions1Legg, S., & Hutter, M. (2007). A collection of definitions of intelligence. In B. Goertzel & P. Wang (Eds.) Proceedings of the 2007 conference on advances in artificial general intelligence: Concepts, architectures and algorithms: Proceedings of the AGI workshop 2006 (pp. 17–17). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: IOS Press. and can mean anything from being able to reason, learn, acquire knowledge to being self-aware or emotionally intelligent (kudos to you for such a sensitive answer!). Then I would ask you, and where have you encountered such an intelligence displayed by machines? At which point you might say “Siri is a bit like this? Or maybe Google?”
Ah, now we get to interesting types of technologies. Siri recognises what you say and formulates an answer, which it does by using Natural Language Processing (NLP), a specific type of Machine learning (ML). ML in turn, is a specific type of AI. And back we are to the question, what is AI? (Fear not, we will get back to NLP and ML shortly).
Come on Siri, leave Kant out of it, you know it’s 422Don’t know what this is referring to? Shame on you. Go read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and come back to this blog when you finished and are properly educated. And bring a towel!.
One can take a broad view on AI, where pretty much anything based on statistics is a form of AI. Some companies have used such a broad view to their advantage, by marketing their products as “AI-based” even if they are actually built on simpler regression models or rules. This even has its own term, known as “AI washing.”3https://www.thinkautomation.com/bots-and-ai/watch-out-for-ai-washing/
At the other end of the spectrum, you have those who believe AI should only refer to Artificial General Intelligence, something that comes closer to our Sci-Fi Arnold. Let me give you an example of each.
Take Siri, for instance. Siri is currently somewhere in between those two spectrums. What would a simple, rule-based little brother of Siri (let’s call him Arnold) look like? You would take your favourite programming language (mine is Python), and start typing a few lines, like so: if Michaela says “Hello”: then Arnold should respond: “Hello, Michaela!” In Python, it would look something like this:
I can now run this script, type in “hello” and get an answer:
Wow amazing! Although it would also be great, if Arnold knew what to do, if I don’t type exactly the word “hello.”
Will Arnold kill us all soon?
Doesn’t look like it.
This is what you would call a rule-based system (a veeery simple one)4You can try coding this yourself, by going to colab.research.google.com, by the way 🙂. Everything that happens needs to be explicitly coded, otherwise it will generate an error (or go into an endless “No comprendo, José” loop).
Of course, I made it sound highly simplistic, but many companies actually use chatbots based on a rule-type logic and call it “AI-based.” But in terms of intelligence, they might be more similar to a Roomba, one of those cleaning robots that you might have in your home. It will talk at times — but it only talks because it has been instructed to talk at those times, like when returning “home”. It simply checks if a rule applies and follows instructions. No machine learning there and experts in the field would likely not call this AI (although the latest Roomba’s use machine learning to clean, post on that to come!).
Siri is a bit different.
Even though she tells you that she only understands what she has been programmed to understand, it is not like in our example above. Because Siri can kill you.
Just kidding!
Siri first uses speech recognition technology to translate your speech into text. This means that Siri records the words you say into your microphone, sends them to an Apple server, accesses a database, breaks down your words into teeny-tiny units of sounds called phonemes, uses statistics to figure out the probability of your sequence of phonemes to match one that is recorded in the database, to finally decide if there is a “match” or not. Homophones are especially tricky (i.e., did you say merry, marry, or Mary?), so Siri may also analyse the sentence as a whole, break it down into its linguistic parts-of-speech (such as nouns, verbs, adjectives), and figure out which one of the three words is most likely. You see now why Siri is not happy when you speak to her in Swiss-German or some other dialect? How should poor Siri know that Chuchichäschtli means Küchenschrank (German for cupboard)?
Actually, nice researchers are working on trying to build speech recognition systems that recognise your slang-y kinda language (e.g., Swisscom and the Language and Space Lab at UZH).
A day in the near future
Where were we? Right, so now Siri recognised what you said (or not).
Next, she tries to figure out the meaning behind what you said, to know how to proceed. For this she uses Natural Language Understanding (NLU) (a subfield of Natural Language Processing) technology, such as intent classification. Let’s imagine you say “Siri, wake me up at 6am.” After having converted your speech into text, she now uses a machine learning model, trained on a large dataset of sentences with their intents (e.g., for a sentence “Wake me up,” the intent-label might be: “set alarm”. For a sentence “Remind me,” the intent-label might be: “set reminder”), to predict the intent of this sentence.
Once she knows the intent is “set alarm,” or “remind me” she uses something called slot filling. Setting the alarm requires her to know at what time, so she will look for something in the sentence that matches a time. i.e. “6am”. She has been instructed to open the time app on your device and set the alarm to the time you specified. If no time is specified, she will ask you for the missing information. Similarly, for a reminder, she will need to know what the reminder should be.
If you ask her if a duck’s quack can echo, she will recognise that this is a knowledge-type question and that she should query the internet (instead of filling slots). Like so:
You see, a bit more complicated than our “if … then…” statement earlier. And also, much more versatile.
Hm quite evasive…I was more sure about Arnold.
Now we have something that we can safely call AI. Siri “listens” to your speech through your microphone, processes it, learns something from it, and performs an action, all autonomously.5This goes along the line of Russell and Norvig’s definition of Artificial Agents: Russell, S. and Peter Norvig. “Artificial Intelligence – A Modern Approach, Third International Edition.” (2010).
But this is not Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). AGI would imply that Siri would be able to learn how to learn. Right now she still relies on a programmer in the background to provide her with some “if…then…” instructions on how to access which database, and which algorithm to use with which data, to learn something very specific.
Siri agrees.
Instead, AGI would imply that Siri would figure the above out by herself. In fact, natural language understanding belongs to a class of problems that has been termed “AI-hard,”6An analogy to the NP-hard problem from computer science. which means that if you could solve such a complex problem, you would be at the root of the “AI-problem” itself: it would imply Siri could memorise everything that has been said, take context into account, take decisions autonomously, potentially respond with emotions, and therefore, do what a human can do.
Sounds creepy? I agree.
AGI is not yet on the horizon7But, whether you or me like it or not, research is working towards it, i.e. see Pei, J., Deng, L., Song, S. et al. Towards artificial general intelligence with hybrid Tianjic chip architecture. Nature572, 106–111 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1424-8, and luckily not, because we are currently still far from figuring out what ethics apply when machines are involved and what makes us trust in AIs (I hope to contribute to this line of work in my PhD). This is why you will sometimes see funny experiments like the Moral Machine8https://www.moralmachine.net/, where researchers are interested to see which “lesser evil” people will chose, like killing two passengers or five pedestrians. If we don’t even know what’s right, how should a machine know?
I can see you rolling your eyes at me now, because you made it all the way to this part of the post, are realising now that it is soon ending, and you probably still don’t know what AI is. Let me re-assure you, neither does the research community at times.9Kaplan, A. and M. Haenlein. “Siri, Siri, in my hand: Who’s the fairest in the land? On the interpretations, illustrations, and implications of artificial intelligence.” Business Horizons 62 (2019): 15-25. The answer is, it depends on what you consider as intelligent.
More importantly: will Siri kill us? Here the answer is clearly no.
For my 30th birthday, mid-October 2019, my wonderful boyfriend took me on a surprise trip to Copenhagen, a city that had been on our bucket list to visit.
The trip started with the pilot announcing after 30 minutes of flight, that we have to return to the departure airport, because of “a funny smell” in the back of the plane. I was entirely certain, of course, that we were going to die — the smell was clearly an indication that some highly essential fluid was leaking in gas-form, or that some new form of terrorist attack involving toxic gases was in process.
We ended up landing back in Basel, Switzerland, and it was not entirely re-assuring to see a crew of security personell and fire fighters running towards the plane (at that point I was entirely sure it was going to explode). I should perhaps mention that my boyfriend had been watching a flight crash series for weeks before this trip (thank you, honey!), which had added extra fuel to my generally well-developed imagination regarding potential causes of death.
In the end, we arrived safe and sound (thanks to a replacement plane, because the first one surely exploded), in rainy Copenhagen.
Clearly a bike-city
Colourful Copenhagen (when the sun is out that is)
As per usual, we started our sightseeing via breakfasts and coffees. I personally love the Scandinavian breakfast style, which reminds me of my childhood in Hamburg. Lots of dark breads, topped with meats, cheeses and eggs (also known as Smørrebrød). Good and hearty stuff, your bones have to weather the year-long cold and rain afterall.
Mind you, the prices are Switzerland-compatible, so we needed to keep our coffee and breakfast splurges in check. I didn’t think it was possible to beat the breakfast bills we have seen in Zurich, with 5+ CHFs charged for a simple cup of coffee, but Copenhagen was right up the same alley. Craziest of all were prices for alcohol — I believe Copenhagen managed to beat Zurich in that.
“I can see Sweden from here!”
After day 2 of exploring Copenhagen and paying multiple arms and a legs for coffee, we thought “Hm, Sweden is just a bridge-crossing away, what if their coffee only costs an arm there?”
Copenhagen Train Station
Travel- and coffee-enthusiastic as we are, the next day, we took an early-morning train to Lund, a small and quaint town, home to one of the oldest universities of Scandinavia, Lund University, and presumably the oldest town in Sweden (in fact, archeologist date it back to 9901 https://kulturportallund.se/en/notes-to-the-history-of-lund/),
At 9am we arrived and took a beautiful fall stroll around town, visiting the University area and Botanical Gardens. When we enthusiastically entered a beautiful little café, called “Love Coffee Roasters,” to compare prices to Denmark, we got a heart attack, though. It appeared at first, that we would not only have to pay an arm and a leg, but also a liver for the coffee. Fortunately, we then realised that the Swedish and Danish crown are not exactly the same currency and 45 Swedish crowns are roughly the equivalent of 33 Danish crowns. Or 5 CHFs. Phew, just another arm-and-leg situation, no livers involved!
Classicum, Lund University
Time for some Fisksoppa
After that we started to look for lunch options. A quick Google Maps search showed us the Market Hall in the center of Lund, where we found a promising-looking place called Malmstens Fisk & Kök.
Malmsten Fisksoppa – I know, the picture will not receive an award for instagrammability, I am still learning.
We saw many people eating an orange-ish looking soup, which seemed to fill the air with a decadent scent. The waitress informed us, this was the “Malmsten Fisksoppa.”
We ordered it and wanted to cry (no, really), it was that delicious. Imagine an immaculately successful fusion of a Bouillabaisse and Fish Curry. Add to that freshly made, warm bread and butter, which, as the waitress informed us, we could serve ourselves, unlimited! We wanted to cry even more.
I vowed that day to try to make this soup at home and after several trials, I succeeded to copy it! I wish I could capture smell and taste in words, but trust me, this soup is amazing. If you would like to try, check out my recipe.
In 1674, a Woman’s Petition Against Coffee was published in London.
Women’s Petition Against Coffee, 1674, picture from Wikipedia
Coffee was a new thing in England around that time and the newly introduced coffeehouses became the “cool” hangout place of choice for men of importance. The women complained that they were deserted by their husbands, who frequented the coffeehouses and were thereby rendered impotent by the drink.
“For can any woman of sense or spirit endure with patience that when […] she approaches the nuptial bed, expecting a man that with Sprightly Embraces, should answer the vigour of her flames, she on the contrary should only meet a bedful of bones, and hug a meager useless corpse?”1https://www.uni-giessen.de/fbz/fb05/germanistik/absprache/sprachverwendung/gloning/tx/wom-pet.htm
The women’s petition also complained that coffee made men too talkative:
“For besides, we have reason to apprehend and grow Jealous, That Men […] soon learn to exeel us in Talkativeness: a Quality wherein our Sex has ever Claimed preheminence: For here like so many Frogs in a puddle, they sup muddy water, and murmur insignificant notes till half a dozen of them out-babble an equal number of us at a Gossipping, talking all at once in Confusion, and running from point to point […].”2https://www.uni-giessen.de/fbz/fb05/germanistik/absprache/sprachverwendung/gloning/tx/wom-pet.htm
This story gets even better, because a reply was published around the same time by the men in their defence. Among other things, it stated:
“Could it be imagined, that ungrateful Women, after so much laborious Drudgery, both by Day and Night, and the best of our Blood and Spirits spent in your Service, you should thus publicly Complain? Certain we are, that there never was Age or Nation more Indulgent to your Sex […].”3https://www.uni-giessen.de/fbz/fb05/germanistik/absprache/sprachverwendung/gloning/tx/mens-answer-1674.htm
Men’s Answer to the Women’s Petition Against Coffee, 1674, picture from Wikipedia
The poor men go on lamenting:
“But why must innocent COFFEE be the object of your Spleen? That harmless and healing Liquor, which Indulgent Providence first sent amongst us […].”4https://www.uni-giessen.de/fbz/fb05/germanistik/absprache/sprachverwendung/gloning/tx/mens-answer-1674.htm
Afterwards, King Charles II issued a Proclamation for the Suppression of coffeehouses, because they ‘were the resort of idle and disaffected persons who mis-spent their time, instead of being employed about their lawful callings, and published malicious and scandalous reports to the defamation of His Majesty’. Then, 11 days later, he changed his mind. 5 Smith R.F. (1985) A History of Coffee. In: Clifford M.N., Willson K.C. (eds) Coffee. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-6657-1_1
This story has so much to offer that I don’t know exactly where to start commenting. Also I have many questions I wish I could ask these people. So I will just leave this here.
But to summarise, coffee is awesome, and I side with the men.
Some more History
There are a few legends on the discovery of the dark brew. One of the more famous ones claims the origins of the drink date to 9th century Abyssinia, where a goat herder noticed his goats getting very excited around certain trees. Upon closer inspection, he saw the berries and decided to take them to a nearby monastery. The local monks thought that they must be coming from the devil and threw them in the fire. Noticing the pleasant aroma immediately after, they scraped the beans out of the fire and placed them in boiling water, hence giving birth to the first cup of coffee.6 Smith R.F. (1985) A History of Coffee. In: Clifford M.N., Willson K.C. (eds) Coffee. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-6657-1_1
Another old legend has it that coffee was introduced to Mohammed together with the Koran. When he lay ill and prayed to Allah, the angel Gabriel descended with a beverage ‘as black as the Kaaba of Mecca’ that gave him ‘enough strength to unseat 40 men from their saddles and make love to the same number of women’.7 Smith R.F. (1985) A History of Coffee. In: Clifford M.N., Willson K.C. (eds) Coffee. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-6657-1_1
(Hm, too bad there is no such legend connected to the bible…it would have been a fun addition to the story, if God would have said “Moses, I will give thee tables of stone, and a law, and commandments which I have written; also, here is some coffee, ya might need it!”)
In the 17th century Sultan Murad IV banned coffee in Constantinople (apparently he did not like the idea of unseating men and making love). He would walk around the city with an executioner and behead people for breaking the ban.8Davis, William Stearns (1922). A short history of the Near East: from the founding of Constantinople (330 A.D. to 1922). New York: The Macmillan Company. pp. 259–260.
(If only they did this with people not wearing masks during Covid…)
Invading Turkish armies later brought coffee to Europe in the 17th century. There is some historical debate on the origins of the traditional Viennese coffeehouses (now a UNESCO cultural heritage). According to some accounts, the Turkish army left several hundred bags of coffee in a warehouse, which were discovered by Franz Georg Kolschinski, who ended up going from door to door to sell cups of coffee. When he was rewarded with the gift of a house in Vienna by the Austrians for his wartime bravery, he turned it into a coffeehouse. They became popular all over Europe and a popular business meeting place, as mentioned in the story at the beginning of this post.9 Smith R.F. (1985) A History of Coffee. In: Clifford M.N., Willson K.C. (eds) Coffee. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-6657-1_1
Nowadays, coffee is one of the most consumed beverages in the world. In the last year, the world has consumed 166 628 bags, containing 60 kg coffee.10http://www.ico.org/prices/new-consumption-table.pdf That’s about 2.25 billion cups per day.
It is also the most consumed beverage by me.
Hamburg
I don’t remember exactly when I started drinking coffee. What I remember very well is my obsession with Gilmore Girls growing up (don’t mock me, they are cool) and in retrospective, Lorelei’s obsession with coffee must have left an impression on me.
Oh Lorelei (big nostalgic sigh).
I grew up in Hamburg, a port city with a rich coffee trading history. In the Speicherstadt, near the old town of Hamburg, coffee would be stored and roasted; you can still get a feel of this at the Kaffeerösterei11speicherstadt-kaffee.de.
At times I remember walking around the city, the wind carrying the amazingly rich scent of freshly roasted coffee my way. At the Dammtor, the train station where I had to get off to go to school, there used to be a little Italian Gelateria, where my mom would sometimes take me to have a Caramel Latte Macchiato (and a Gelato, of course).
Besides the Gelateria, my childhood friends and I used to frequent Balzac12www.balzaccoffee.com coffee during our lunch break. Named after Honoré de Balzac, who was known for obsessively drinking 50 cups of coffee a day, Balzac was the golden-brown smaller brother of Starbucks, before the grand Starbucks invasion. There we would sit at the age of 14, feeling all smug and adult, sipping our lattes, and discuss important life events that one has at the age of 14.
Virginia
In 2006, the year that Starbucks invaded Hamburg13https://www.food-service.de/maerkte/news/Starbucks-zieht-in-die-Kaffeestadt-Hamburg-10615, I moved to Richmond, Virginia, barely missing the invasion. I had heard of Starbucks before and even seen it in Berlin. It was a magical place for 16 year-old-me, like an upgraded, exotic version of Balzac, green and undiscovered. When I discovered that 5 Minutes from my new home in Richmond would be a Starbucks, I was thrilled! Of course I was not earning money at the time, so having a Frappuccino was a Christmas-like present each time. I remember asking for extra portions of the caramel sauce they would put on top of the whipped cream (oh to be young and have a young metabolism…) and cherishing each sip as long as I could.
My love-affair with Starbucks took an abrupt end a few years later, as I came back to visit Hamburg, only to find my happy-place Gelateria replaced by a Starbucks. I vowed that day never to set foot in a Starbucks again (and only have broken it since then, when someone else insisted to set foot in it).
Chicago
I moved to Chicago in 2008. My first experiences there involved something called a “Black Eye,” which is basically half a liter of coffee with two shots of espresso in it. This was my beverage of choice during my Bachelor exams. My unhealthy level of alertness matched that of the lady on the poster hanging in my kitchen. It took my sleep cycle around 4 weeks to get back to normal, after finishing my Bachelor.
When I finished my Bachelor and started my first job at the Swiss Consulate downtown, I discovered Intelligentsia Coffee (specifically the one at the corner of Randolph and Wabash Ave). It will always have a special place in my heart, as this is where I discovered the beauty of third wave filter coffee.
Coffee has come a long way from being served in coffeehouses in Vienna and London. The food critic Jonathan Gold defined the different waves of coffee as follows “The first wave of American coffee culture was probably the 19th-century surge that put Folgers on every table, and the second was the proliferation, starting in the 1960s at Peet’s and moving smartly through the Starbucks grande decaf latte, of espresso drinks and regionally labeled coffee. We are now in the third wave of coffee connoisseurship, where beans are sourced from farms instead of countries, roasting is about bringing out rather than incinerating the unique characteristics of each bean, and the flavor is clean and hard and pure.”14https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_wave_of_coffee
Intelligentsia was a pioneer of the third wave. Here I would go, day in and out, spend an arm and a leg for a coffee that would take 15+ minutes to make, while people next door at Starbucks would fly in and out within seconds.
Your coffee just tastes differently when a barista with a cup of coffee tattooed on the arm made it.
But it was worth it, because after waiting and admiring those strange people behind the counter making coffee in strange appliances, making small-talk with them and fellow coffee-addicts, breathing in all the other-worldly scents from freshly roasted coffee beans, and judging Starbucks clientele by collectively shooting them dirty looks, I would end up with the most beautiful cup of coffee, which I would hold dearly while walking up Michigan Avenue to the office.
Washington D.C.
When I moved to Washington D.C. in 2014, the first thing I did was to look for a replacement for Intelligentsia Coffee. I never exactly found a replacement, but I did find Tryst15https://www.trystdc.com/ in Adams Morgan, a truly amazing place and as hipster as one can find. They did not have a single chair that matched another, not a single cup that matched the rest of the china, and you would get your beverage with little animal crackers. While D.C. was not my favourite city in the world, Tryst was. It is the only place in the world that I have found so far to make an excellent Iced Vegan Dirty Chai Latte (yes, I needed a few attempts to get that one right and in the right order).
Tryst Coffeehouse, picture from their website
Zurich
By the time I moved to Zurich in 2015, getting to know a city via coffeeshops had become a habit for me. I prepared for my first job interview in Zurich at Café Noir. I spent hours studying for my Master’s exams at Boréal. I made new friends at Auer & Co.
Whenever I travel to a new city, I continue the tradition of marking all the coolest looking coffee places and I plan my sightseeing around coffee breaks. I also need coffee shops for orientation (“Ah, that street that is a block away from XYZ coffee!”).
Exploring València via coffee.
Exploring Lisbon via coffee.
My boyfriend asks me on a regular basis if I still love him more than coffee, so you can imagine its importance in my life.
So, of course when I started thinking about my blog, coffee needed to have a noteworthy place somehow. To begin with, I put it in the title. Together with the cows and robots, it sounded quite hipster to me, and that seems to be a requirement for blog titles these days, so…win-win!
What Type of Coffee, you ask?
Probably you didn’t ask, but I will tell you anyway, since you are here. I am a filter-coffee drinker through and through. An Italian friend of mine said once to me, filter-coffee is just dirty water (I had heart palpitations for the rest of the day). Admittedly, when done wrong, it can taste quite nasty. I have had many cups of coffee in my life that made me cry and I drank them more out of desperation (since not drinking coffee is not an option).
Indeed.
But when done right … it’s magic. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate other forms of coffee, any really. Espresso, Bialetti, French Press (although not my favorite), cold brew, Syphon, whatever-newest-hipster-craze, you name it, I drink it. But nothing tops a perfectly brewed filter coffee.
So, now you know a number of cool historical facts about coffee, a few historical facts of how and where I discovered coffee, why many of my travel posts inevitably have a short excursion into the coffee shops in the area, and why I have a poster hanging in my kitchen that shows a slightly too alert-looking lady with a coffee mug in her hand. Now go make yourself some, wherever you are…
..and if you got some Baileys, even better, put it in! Cheers!
I believe I have a funny way of travelling. See, some people mark monuments or historical or touristy sights on their Google map and then plan breaks in between to find something to eat. We do the opposite. We mark places to eat and drink coffee on our map and then plan breaks to find something to look at.
Mjam, Taberna Las Beatillas. Oh look, next to it is a historical landmark!
I actually spent some time on Wikipedia to try to see, if I am a bit weird, or if there is other people like me. Then I thought, is the fact that I am looking up if there is a category for me in itself something weird? After reading about foodies and culinary tourists and food nomads, I came to the conclusion that it must be a Millenial kind of thing. I mean both, the travelling and the searching Wikipedia for a sense of belonging. Don’t judge, it’s tough being a Millenial.1JP explains how tough it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=00FDR1E0zvE&ab_channel=AwakenWithJP
In conclusion: I make plans around food. Going to visit Cordóba in Andalusia on a road trip to Spain in 2019 was one of those plans.
Earlier that year on a long weekend trip to Madrid, I had discovered an amazing cold summer soup, a Gazpacho 2.0 really (an Andalusian may kill me for saying this). It is called the Salmorejo Cordobés. How to describe it? It is like the smoothest pureness of tomatoe purée you could ever imagine. Slightly sweet, slightly tangy, extremely refreshing, and actually quite filling (it’s basically tomatoes, bread and oil, with a bit of garlic, puréed until reaching heavenly smooth delight). Watch me eat it in the below picture and you get the idea of how amazing this stuff tastes.
Salmorejo and Gazpacho, in all its shades!
Do you see how the crackers just sit in there? It is THAT thick, THAT creamy, THAT amazing. As you can see, it is usually topped with some chopped eggs and Jamón, which is the cherry on the cake. Or frosting. Or both.
So, you see why I had to go to its origin.
The origin happens to be a lovely and colourful Andalusian city, which does not have a healthy relationship with Google Maps. To reach the hotel, Google leads one through the smallest of roads (and I did not have the smallest of cars), packed with Pedestrians, until finally a Taxi driver stopped me and asked what in the world I am doing. Upon explaining, he said “Google Maps? No. No coche aquí. Google no funciona aquí!”
(I still wonder why HE was there, if no car was supposed to be there).
The roads Google lead us through
The entrance of the parking garage of the hotel was so steep that upon entering, the car ended up stuck in the middle. I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but let me tell you, getting stuck with a car is one thing, getting stuck in the middle of a small pedestrian road with lots of Spanish folks staring, laughing and shaking their head at the Swiss tourist, is a very stressful experience.
The people from the hotel ended up coming to the rescue, explaining that there is a technique to enter the garage, by which you have to drive as much as possible to the left side of the entrance, which was apparently the only place where the architects designed it at the correct steepness, and then slowly slalom down (Duh! Such ignorant Swiss I am, thinking all garages have been designed to allow cars to actually enter them!). They then helped push the car out of its stuck-ness, and luckily it worked, because I don’t believe a towing truck could have made it anywhere near us.
After this adventurous first day, I was ready to admire the city, boasting with beautiful Moorish architecture, and most notably the Mezquita, originally a Mosque, now a cathedral, a gem in Spanish historical monuments and a UNESCO world heritage site.
Also, there is an excellent coffee shop next to it, the “Maddow Coffee Shop”
The city also has a thing for blue flowerpots (they are everywhere, though I never found out why). It makes sense that such a beautiful, colourful and sunny place would produce a beautiful, colourful and sunny soup.
Of course, I needed to reproduce this soup at home. For quite some time, I did not dare, because I thought something this amazing must require the most amazing tomatoes Europe has to offer, which could only be found in Spain (and definitely not in Switzerland, where most Southeners complain at the blandness of fruit and veggies). However, one day I gave it a try and I am glad I did. Not to dismiss the value of a good tomato — if you can get your hands on the freshest, sweetest, juiciest tomato, by all means, buy those, or better yet, grow those, it will be all the better. However, I regularly make Salmorejo at home with Swiss tomatoes and excellent Spanish olive oil, and let me tell you, it’s like bringing a bit of Spain into your kitchen. If you would like to try yourself, check out my recipe.
And if you are ever in that corner of Andalusia, make sure to visit Cordoba (preferably with a smart car or scooter, and definitely not with a BMW) and have an extra bowl of Salmoréjo for me! My suggestion for an excellent bowl: Taberna La Montillana.2https://www.tabernalamontillana.com/ And another excellent address for other types of Spanish food: Taberna Las Beatillas.3http://tabernabeatillas.com/
