Pa amb Tomàquet (Bread Rubbed with Tomato)

Variations

• Tomàquet de penjar: the Catalan hanging tomato, thick-skinned with little flesh, kept on the stem through winter. It is the ideal thing to rub with — the skin works as a handle and holds together to the end.
• Tomate ratllat (grated): many households now grate the tomato and spread it with a spoon. That is the answer when the bread is too soft to abrade; the result is similar and the bread wets faster.
• Pa amb oli: oil and salt with no tomato at all. It is this dish's other name and the older form, from the seasons with no tomatoes in them.
• On top: jamón, anchovies, manchego, botifarra. In Catalonia this is the base of a meal rather than a snack beside one.
• Garlic or no garlic: households divide. If you use it, once or twice is plenty.

Tips

• The bread is the grater. Bruschetta sets the mechanism out on the garlic side: the rub is a very shallow cut, and "a warm, rough, dry crust abrades a little of the surface and that is the whole of the rupture". This dish puts the same abrasion to work on the tomato. What changes is that the thing being rubbed is soft rather than hard, so the tomato is what comes away and the bread is what does the work.
• So no knife ever touches it, and the water question never arises. Bruschetta dices its tomato, which forces a decision about seeding or salting ahead, and that page lays out the three answers its neighbours give. Here there is no dice at all. The pulp goes straight into the crumb and the skin stays in your hand, so there is nothing left to sit and weep.
• A thick-skinned tomato is the right tomato. The skin is what you are holding on to while you rub. A thin, watery one collapses halfway and disappears into your fingers. Ripe but not soft; in Catalonia, one off the hanging bunch.
• The order is tomato, then oil, then salt. Oil first seals the surface and the pulp can only sit on top of it. Salt last is the same fact from the other side — it stays on the oil instead of dissolving into the tomato, so you meet it separately as you bite (salt and seasoning).
• The bread is wetted, not soaked. Fattoush's bread is there to hold up without drinking, and gazpacho's bread becomes the liquid; this bread is neither. All that goes in is the juice of one tomato, so the crumb dampens while the crust stays crisp — which is why time is this dish's enemy.
• Day-old bread is better. A fresh loaf has a damp crumb and a soft surface, and rubbing tears it. Toasting does the same job with heat that a day does with time.
• Use an extra virgin oil. Nothing here is cooked, so the oil is not a medium, it is simply one of the flavours. That is precisely the case cooking oils reserves an aromatic oil for.