Yabbit, I don't know what sultanas are, but the recipe sounds yummy.

@KARATEKID: Sultanas are the British term for white raisins. You can use black if you like but I think they're gross. I put both terms for those of us of the European persuasion.

@ASHLEY: (BTW I love your name, that is the one I would have chosen for me, if I'd had my "druthers".)
The pasta with bread thing I think started happening in the restaurants, as a filler. Kind of like the roll-and-butter thing, something to play with while you wait. Certainly most Italian meals have pasta somewhere, the idea being that "gives a base to your stomach" as I have heard mothers say!  ;D Basically they fill up on that and the meat-dish or whatever goes farther. Same principal as polenta--four bites and you're dragging!
As to bread in Spain, they are notorious for being unable to eat without bread, to the place that some young journalists went to Brazil to research for a book; they spent the night in an isolated monastic community in the rainforest, and the brothers actually made bread specially for them "because we know you can't eat without bread." It would be like asking Asians to eat without rice, I guess.
BUT you never are offered a roll-and-butter here, my father used to make smartnose remarks about how all the cows were dead. Bread is Food, here. Eating bread just to eat bread, with nothing else, means you feel you haven't been fed and are trying to fill up. This is hard for a lot of Americans who were raised on Wonder Bread and such as that--they come and taste bakery bread and fall in love, and eat it like cake, while the Spanish person who prepared the meal feels offended and searches the cupboards for something else to offer!