panish cuisine has dazzled the world for years with its imaginative brio and technological expertise, a truly avant-garde approach to food that is capable of combining and finding harmony between the most extreme elements. But there also exists a lower-middle-class tradition, one which is still followed in roadside bars, neighbourhood cafés, and small local restaurants, that similarly displays the capacity to make the gastronomically impossible possible with the benefits of only popular wisdom and a sense of thrift. This is the , which, akin to the American Blue Plate Special, is a single, tremendously economical dish in which several disparate (and affordable) ingredients are have remained an essential part of both the emotional and gustatory landscapes of their country for several generations of Spaniards.
