Why set up cooking pots? Weren't Europeans supposed to eat bread?
That was really just a stereotype left behind by the Industrial Age. In the mid-nineteenth century, especially in backward regions of Spain, the staple food of ordinary people was still a hodgepodge of vegetables and grain, cooked into porridge or soup.
Besides, Franz was providing relief to win people's hearts, not simply handing out food.
Soup and porridge cooked in huge pots could be made quickly from the fewest ingredients, yielding food for a great many people.
Cooking in huge pots also made the best possible use of whatever ingredients were available, regardless of region or season, and helped prevent waste.
A brief bit of trivia: Spaniards did grow rice, and they ate it too.
The Austrian Empire couldn't have relied entirely on food shipped from the homeland and its colonies; it had to buy some local ingredients as well.
Rice was one such local ingredient, so there was nothing wrong with calling the dish porridge or soup.
However, the rice used here wasn't the expensive Spanish bomba rice used in the later national dish, Spanish seafood paella.
It was a mix of primitive varieties. The wealthy wouldn't touch this coarse rice; only commoners ate it to fill their stomachs. The two kinds of rice differed in price by dozens of times, just like the gap between rich and poor in Spain at the time.
Strictly speaking, Spanish paella was a dish, on a par with French snails and Italian pasta. It was usually garnished with shrimp, crab roe, black clams, clams, oysters, squid, and caviar, then paired with fine wine.
The brown rice eaten by commoners, on the other hand, was a staple. It usually tasted poor, at least by the standards of the upper classes.
Because soup