Pensacola Gaspachee Salad
The following recipe is from the May 27 edition of our weekly recipe newsletter. To receive this newsletter in your inbox, sign up here!
As you can probably deduce by its name, Pensacola Gaspachee Salad is one of the more region specific recipes from Lari Robling's Endangered Recipes. According to Florida food historian Wilmer Mitchell, this salad was inspired by Spanish and Italian sailors who would make gazpacho and dip their hardtack into it. Although I've never given much thought to sailors eating gazpacho, I suppose it would do a good job of keeping scurvy away.
Somehow soup and crackers evolved into salad with crackers. In Pensacola there are dozens of variations on this salad. Robling's version is a crunchy concoction of tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, and bell peppers in a slightly sour mayonnaise dressing.
Pensacola Gaspachee Salad
- makes 8 cups -
Adapted from Endangered Recipes by Lari Robling.
Ingredients
8 Crown Pilot crackers (one sleeve, 4.6 ounces) or 5 ounces hardtack
3/4 cup mayonnaise
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
Black pepper to taste
3 stalks celery, diced 1/4 inch
2 cucumbers, peeled, seeded, and diced 1/4 inch
2 large tomatoes, chopped
1 green bell pepper, seeded, membrane removes, and diced 1/4 inch
1 medium Spanish onion, diced 1/4 inch
Bibb lettuce, for serving
Procedure
1. Soak crackers in water for about 1 hour, until completely soft. Squeeze dry. There should be about 1 cup.
2. Mix crackers, mayonnaise, vinegar, and pepper together. Toss with celery, cucumbers, tomatoes, bell peppers, and onion and serve well chilled on lettuce.
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2 Comments:
Funny, I grew up in Pensacola and have never heard of this. Maybe a leftover from the 17th century. I'd rather leave it there with other words like scurvy and hardtack.
rrrvin at 3:31PM on 06/03/09
I also grew up in Pensacola and remember making gaspachee salad with my mother. This memory of making this cool summer salad has come to me many times but I could never find hard tack. We bought hand tack in Pensacola at a bakery across from old Sacred Heart hospital on Gonzalez St. between 12th and 13th. Its an old recipe as she was the first baby born at that hospital in 1915.
flipsanz at 3:48PM on 06/28/09