A recent comment about having to cook on one burner while kitchenless made me think about my year living in France during my degree course - living in a disused school accommodation block at the Lycee next to the one where I worked, and cooking on a single calor-gas burner (with a kettle too). Youth of course made it easier to accept a restricted diet - often wine, cheese, and fabulous French bread from a bakery 200m distant - but I learned a huge amount about food and cooking in that year. Austerity, restrictions, can teach us coping strategies and the value of what we have. Variations on beans with big thick smoked pork sausages when it was cold were great, the sausages already cooked, but benefiting from the heat, their flavour enhancing the beans (not at that time Heinz in France, but some sort of cassoulet flavoured versions, often with chunks of petit-sale in them.
The big thing that I learned there was the value of great bread. Sadly it is still, 30 years later, almost impossible to find really good bread in this country. Waitrose makes an effort, Booth's sadly has very expensive stuff without a hint of crispy crust, and Sainsbury's is a disaster zone. So I make my own when moved to do so, which at least is free of additives, and for a brief moment has a crust worthy of the name.
It is totally impossible to find good French sticks here. They need a Vienna oven, and should have both crispy crust and a very holey interior. Not one that supermarkets go for as they are stale within three hours at most, but when fresh there is IMHO no better bread anywhere. The stuff I bought when living in France was inevitably nibbled on the short walk home, nobody could resist that aroma surely?
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