The staff of life

[shewhomust]

Memo to self: When you say "This French loaf is nice enough, but it is not a real French baguette," bear in mind that nor is the average French baguette. Even in France, a baguette is now a stick of close-textured white bread which toughens when it looses its freshness, rather than the coarse, open-textured, slightly sour loaf that you remember, which had to be bought fresh for each meal because it was rock-hard when stale, and stale within hours.

Having made this note after breakfast, I mentally revised not its content but its tone at lunch time: it's true that the baguette is no longer what it was, but nor is it these days the only bread available. Our lunchtime picnic included delicious organic wholemeal rolls which we had bought at the Carrefour hypermarket on the outskirts of Narbonne.