Slices of country bread, toasted or not, rubbed with a cut ripe tomato and sometimes garlic, then soaked with olive oil and salted.
What makes it pa amb tomàquet
Good, open-crumbed country bread — pa de pagès.
Ripe tomato rubbed into the crumb until it's pink.
Olive oil and salt; garlic if you like.
Where it comes from
It's the everyday bread of Catalonia: at breakfast, under cured ham or beside an omelette, or simply with whatever else is on the table. The tomatoes are often tomàquets de penjar — small, thick-skinned ones hung in bunches to keep through the winter.
How old it is is argued. Most accounts put it in the nineteenth century or later, as a way to soften bread that had gone hard, but no one can point to a first slice. Catalans are clear, though, that the tomato is rubbed in, not chopped on top.
How it varies
Amb pernil
With slices of cured ham on top or alongside.
Pan tumaca
The name it goes by in bars across Spain, where it's often grated tomato spooned on toast.