"Qu'ils mangent de la brioche"

If I’m totally honest, I wasn’t particularly fussed about what living in France with French bread on my doorstep every day meant when I first moved here. To my utter shame, I spent most of my first term buying sliced bread; walking past the beautiful “Pavé Nature”, baguettes and similarly delicious bread on offer that had just been taken from the oven, heading instead for Harry’s American Sandwich Pain de Mie (wholewheat, I’m not an animal). That surely is grounds to chuck me out of the country. Like all sorts of things about life down here – beautiful weather, going for dinner at 10pm, sitting at a café that’s spilling out onto the streets – I’ve only really started appreciating French bread in the past few months. For a mere 29 cents, you can buy a demi baguette; and okay, if you leave it overnight it’ll be rock-solid and will cover your floor with breadcrumbs if you try to slice it – but surely that’s just further incentive to make sure you eat all of that baguette in one day. Challenge accepted. It is more expensive to buy a demi-baguette every day or a fresh loaf every week than it is to buy sliced bread – but there is a massive difference, and you know what? I’m willing to pay that little bit more every day for the two months I’ve got here.

Maybe it’s because it’s because we non-French have this stereotypical image of a French person in a striped Breton top with a silly moustache carrying a baguette under their arm – but bread seems to be as much a part of the way of life here as passive smoking and striking. Coming back from the supermarket on the tram, I heard two ladies grumbling about how the price of a baguette had gone up three cents since last week, whilst a guy in his twenties ripped massive chunks of bread from the baguette in his shopping bag and ate, head nodding in time to the music he was listening to. Any given shopping trolley will contain at least one baguette, and even the cheapest restaurant will bring you a basket of bread that will be refilled whenever it looks like it’s running low absolutely free of charge. The idea that you might have to ask for bread in a restaurant– and then pay for it – is utterly horrifying to a French person. For added shock, I suggest you also add that very few places will bring a bottle of water to your table, and only reluctantly after trying to sell you a very expensive bottle of mineral water.

No matter how you slice it (oh I’m so funny), bread is incredibly important to the French, and why on earth shouldn’t it be? Got some sauce left on your plate? Mop it up with your bread. Can’t be bothered to wash your only knife? Use your bread to push it onto your fork. Fingers a bit greasy from the olive oil on your salad dressing? Bread napkin. Need to soak up some of your Merlot? Bread. Just want to eat bread? Bread. Good luck being gluten-intolerant down here, folks.

What I’m really trying to say is – the bread in France is amazing in a way that I cannot fully explain; and the way it is entrenched in French culture only serves to ensure that it stays that way. And thank goodness for that. Forget Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité – the French motto should be Vive les boulangères et vive le pain.

An uncharacteristically productive Saturday

Turns out the secret to revising for nearly five hours non-stop is to spend it in a café and have two strong café crèmes (complete with biscuits and chocolate) with good music and a friend who won't let you leave before she does.

My hands are shaking a bit. I should probably be more worried than I am.

The café in question is something of a haunt for the anglophone Eramus students - a bookshop called, inventively, Le Bookshop. It's full of English books at eye-watering prices but serves the cheapest coffee of any of the (many) cafés I've sampled in the three months I've been here. It's in the Old Town so the downstairs, where the majority of the bookshop and the tables and chairs are, is underground, all stone and vaulted ceilings and generally very attractive. They host a weekly conversation evening which is meant to be really good for meeting the locals, even though it takes them some persuading to speak in French, and not English! Definitely going on my to-do list for next term. Plus, there are plenty of wall sockets and their wifi is about a hundred times faster than what our halls can offer us, so that's a huge draw. But for me, the main attraction (apart from the dishy waiter, naturally) is their coffee. €1.90 for a café crème that always comes with two little biscuits and a tiny square of dark chocolate. Nom.

Dinner tonight was simple - bread with Boursin and ham on top, and a few petits pains grillés with the last bit of houmous. Carb overload, I know; but as the plan is to go to this bar (which has become the closest thing to our regular) in about an hours' time and have a couple of well-earned drinks, I think having plenty of bread to line the stomach is probably a good idea. Besides, I think I'm still feeling full from the burger I had at 10.30 last night with Chris and Ellen. Only in France.

Po-ta-toes

I have my father to thank for many of my traits. The ability to burn in cloudy weather. The gift of the gab and with it, the ability to talk myself out of or into seemingly any situation. And finally, my insistence that "if a meal doesn't have potato in it, it's not a meal."

My father's from Ireland, can you tell?

All of the people I've lived with have found my deep-seated belief that potatoes a meal make amusing. The Spanish people I was fortunate enough to have shared my kitchen with back in first year seemed pretty impressed by how many different ways of eating potato I could find in the ten months we lived together. Speaking of which...

As you can probably imagine, being a student and part-time potato fiend has its drawbacks. They take a long time to boil, it's not easy to make mash for one person and they're never as good as your mum/dad's. So discovering gnocci was something of a revelation for me.


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Look at them! Beautiful, potato-y pillows of goodness. The French seem really keen on frying them so they turn into mini-roasties, but I prefer to cook them the more traditional way. I think what I love the most about gnocci is the fact that they are so insanely quick to cook. About five minutes in a pan of boiling, salted water and they all start to congregate together (they're very sociable) and float to the top. And that's it, they're ready.

What I've been doing recently is then draining them, but keeping them in the pan, then adding some bacon lardons and tomato sauce. Once the bacon's cooked, I take them off the hob and - I really do think this is the secret - I add a bit of Boursin. It doesn't have to be a lot, but it just adds even more depth to the flavour of the sauce and makes it beautifully creamy. Best served in a bowl with a slice of fresh bread to mop up all that yummy sauce. Or just to enjoy the bread. Well, when in France.

It's so filling and warm and is just perfect comfort food. I made this last night, after I came home from my lecture. I was tired but I didn't want to eat straight away, so I decided to wait a bit. About an hour after I got in  I was hungry, but I wanted something quick so I wouldn't be eating dinner too late. And good old gnocci saved the day again.

Plus, it was a meal with potato which meant it was an actual meal.