The Spanish national dish

[shewhomust]

It was in Ruesta that we first began to suspect that the national dish of Spain is in fact the fried egg.

I've already said, I think, that the café there offered a choice of egg and chips, ham egg and chips, bacon egg and chips, sausage egg and chips (mysteriously, no spam; it was the egg which was ubiquitous): served sizzling hot and generously salted - another characteristic of Spanish cuisine as we encountered it was a heavy hand with the salt. Sometimes this was a drawback, but when it comes to chips, salt is a guilty pleasure.

Our destination that day was Sos del Rey Católico (pictures) where we stayed in the parador, the first of three on our trip. Where Ruesta was surprising for the signs of life in an apparently abandoned village, Sos was the opposite: in among the cliffs of finely cut stone of the affluent-looking and well maintained houses, a sudden patch of dereliction was as incongruous as a missing tooth. That evening, in the palatial splendour of the dining room, I ordered 'migas', a traditional dish of the region, a great heap of breadcrumbs enriched with morsels of meat and sausage - the whole topped with a fried egg.

For the sake of completeness, I'll add here that later, in a charming hotel in the Rioja, where breakfast each morning was not only the basket of baked goods at your table and the buffet of cheeses and cold cuts, but also a different treat each day, brought to you hot from the kitchen, durham_rambler achieved the Full Spanish Breakfast on the day the little something extra was two fried eggs.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

We almost went to Sos del Rey on our recent expedition, but then the marquis found that the parador at Siguenza was a castle, so... But it sounds rather fine.
He'd like the eggs, too -- though we had more or less decided that the national dish was ham. It came with everything.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Yes, there was a lot of ham, too - but everywhere had its own special regional ham, whereas eggs are eggs.

The parador at Sos is a modern building, but very nicely done.

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Hm, looks almost like a Full Monty? Well...almost! No baked beans, no black sausages, no HP sauce and not a (fried) tomato in sight but frites, as we say in France? Eggs, yes. I haven´t been to Spain yet (just Mallorca, Sollèr and Palma, which is not the same) but remember the food as quite fatty, generally. I love chorizo, though which is not really diet eating. Seems, the spanish stick to simple but good things, nothing wrong about eggs... In Sweden the infamous "Smörgåsbord" was basically just that: things to put on bread. The swedish kitchen is not that exciting but of course I love it. The german satirist Wiglaf Droste still made a brilliant little remark on the ever so popular Mankell hero Wallander who does nothing much except eating yet a few sandwiches... I suppose, this says a little something about swedish culture as seen from abroad. A friend gave me Mankell to read thinking they were doing me an amical service and I tried. It proved to be impossible I had to stop after a few pages and that was not because I got too much of a good thing, like for instance german cheesecake.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Mmm, cheesecake!

But I haven't read any Mankell; durham_rambler is a big fan, so perhaps I will try him, one day.