Salada Algarvia

When I first started documenting recipes from the Algarve, an old woman in Tavira laughed at me. "You want the recipe for salada? Menina, it's tomatoes. It's what we eat when it's too hot to think."

She was right, of course. Salada Algarvia isn't a recipe so much as an understanding. You take the best tomatoes you can find, the ones heavy in your hand, the ones that smell like the vine. You cut them roughly. You add peppers and onion for crunch. You dress it with azeite and vinegar and dried oregano, which is the herb of the Algarve the way coentros belongs to Alentejo.

This is what sits on every tasca table in the summer months. It appears next to grilled fish, beside bifanas at a barbecue, on its own with bread and wine when the heat makes anything heavier feel impossible. No lettuce. No fuss. Just vegetables at their peak, treated with respect.

The bread matters. You need it to drag through the juices that pool at the bottom of the plate, that mixture of tomato water and olive oil and vinegar that might be the best part of the whole dish. Put the salad on the table, put the bread within reach, and let people serve themselves. This is how summer should taste.