Summer soups come in from the cold

There's far more to chilled soups than Spanish gazpacho. And just because we don't have the climate of southern Europe, it doesn't mean we shouldn't be delighting in their frosty flavours

Cold summer soups don't have much of a place in our food culture. It may have more to do with our climate than taste buds, but to settle for Spanish gazpacho is to sell ourselves short. Delicious as this tomato-based soup is, it is only one of a raft of unsung chilled soups – not to mention new recipes creative chefs are adding to the list all the time.

Iced avocado and caviar soup, and a chilled leek and potato soup on jellied aubergine now appear on the menu of Tetsuya Wakuda's restaurant in Sydney. And in addition to his dramatic lobster gazpacho, Spain's surrealist Michelin three-star wonder Ferran Adria (operating near Cadaques on the Costa Brava, former home of Salvador Dali) offers controversial hot-and-cold pea soup. Served in a small glass, this is to be consumed in a gulp. At first it seems to be a hot soup, but it shades down to warm and, finally, ice-cold as you swallow – illustrating graphically how flavour changes with temperatures. How does he do it? He pours cold soup in first, then uses a pipette to add first warm and then hot soup.

Closer to home is Heston Blumenthal whose restaurant, the Fat Duck at Bray, near Maidenhead (tel: 01628 580 333), is a laboratory of experimentation. One of his newest creations is a "gazpacho'' made with red cabbage juice, garnished with a grain mustard ice-cream. "Cabbage juice has a mustardy flavour, so it's a logical combination,'' he says.

But what of the more established cold soups? Before we discovered gazpacho only a decade or so ago, the summer soup served in classic restaurants was vichyssoise, a silky, cold version of French leek and potato soup. As Lindsey Bareham points out in her definitive collection, A Celebration of Soup, though it was created in 1921 by Frenchman Louis Diat, vichyssoise is essentially a New York dish.

Outside Britain, says Bareham, there is a world of delicious cold soups waiting to be discovered: jellied beetroot soup, red pepper jelly with yellow pepper cream, cold curried apple soup, pear and watercress. The great American writer MFK Fisher praises buttermilk soup made with shrimp and cucumber. Elizabeth David singled out a Polish cold fish soup, made with smoked haddock, in her Summer Cooking. In the Middle East you may encounter versions of cooling iced cucumber and yoghurt soup.

Many of the great cold soups of the world are fruity. Flavoured with cinnamon, lemon, sour cream and brandy, Hungarian cold sour cherry soup, meggyleves, is renowned. Russia has a refreshing melon soup with white wine. And in Palestine there's a fruit soup made from oranges, rhubarb, cherries, strawberries, pineapple, lemon and sour cream. In Brazil, it's coconut soup.

Spain, however, is the most plentiful source of cold soups. Exploring Andalusia in the footsteps of the Moors who inhabited Seville, Cordoba and Granada for nearly 800 years, you come across numerous delicious varieties.

Originally a poor man's meal, gazpacho was no more than an emulsion of oil and vinegar, thinned with cold water and poured over yesterday's dry bread. (The word soup actually comes from "sop", the medieval practice of soaking up the gravy and juices from the bread trenchers used as plates.) So the cold soups of Andalusia contain bread – though nothing like our own spongy, technology-enhanced, never-staling loaves. In the baking sun of southern Spain, traditional breads are almost too hard to eat on the second day. Their texture and taste, however, are too good to waste, and provide good nutrition in the form of soups.

In Catalonia, in the north-east of Spain, dry bread is pressed into service to make the regional staple, pa amb oli (literally bread with oil) or pa amb tomaquet (bread with tomato) – toasted slices of country bread rubbed with garlic (or tomato), drizzled with spicy olive oil and seasoned with salt.

Dry, day-old bread is also a basic ingredient of Andalusian almond and garlic soup, known as ajo blanco (ajo being garlic) which often includes grapes and a splash of one of the local sweet wines – such as Malaga.

One of the most prized cold "soups'' in Seville and Cordoba is salmorejo, basically a gazpacho without the liquid. President Chirac of France, visiting Spain, was so taken with the dish that he sent his head chef to Seville to learn how to make it – a rare gesture coming from the French, usually so xenophobic in matters of food. Salmorejo is a pungent tomato and garlic purée. It is eaten with a garnish, usually ham and hardboiled egg, in tapas bars, or as a first course in restaurants.

However, shortcomings of Spanish chilled soups made in the UK are not entirely due to the omission of bread. The lack of flavour in our tomatoes is another serious obstacle to achieving the heights of flavour these soups can reach.

Lindsey Bareham, in her other cook's hat as author of The Big Red Book of Tomatoes, has made it her mission to improve cold tomato soups in Britain, inspired by what several of her chef friends have achieved – even with our unsatisfactory tomatoes. The French chef Michel Trama produces a "cocktail'' of tomato juice that is whole tomatoes crushed and hung overnight in a jelly-bag to release a clear liquid which he mixes with superb, fruity first-pressing olive oil.

Bareham's friend Sally Clarke, of Clarkes in Notting Hill, splits tomatoes and roasts them, sieving them to a purée. She serves it chilled with five kinds of tomatoes sliced on top, with green and purple basil leaves. "More of a salad than a soup,'' says Bareham. "But roasting the tomatoes concentrates the flavour.'' It prompted her to create her own cold soup, using bog-standard British tomatoes, roasting them likewise to concentrate flavour, diluting the purée with ice-cold water, and garnishing it with slices of expensive and flavoursome tomatoes.

Here are some summer soups to try: Heston Blumenthal's red cabbage gazpacho; two tomato soups from The Big Red Book of Tomatoes (Penguin £8.99); almond and garlic soup from Janet Mendel's (André Simon award-winning) Traditional Spanish Cooking (Garnet, £14.95); a vichyssoise from A Celebration of Soup (Penguin, £6.99); and avocado and caviar soup from Tetsuya (newly published by Grub Street, £25). *