Peter Moylan wrote, in >
on Thu, 10 Aug 2006 00:23:27 +1000:

> Robert Bannister wrote:
> > Peter Moylan wrote:
>
> >> meal. The ficelle is similar to a baguette but is very much
> >> thinner, so it's just the right size for one person's worth of
> >> sandwich. Unfortunately, I've never been able to buy une ficelle
> >> anywhere in Australia.
> >
> > Living on a shoe-string, eh?
>
> And that seems to tie up the thread nicely.
>
> Actually, one thing I liked about Paris was that I could eat so cheaply.
> It cost me a fortune in rent to live in Montmartre in what might as well
> have been a garret. (It was good enough for me, but would have been
> hopeless for anyone who liked swinging cats.) The food, however, was
> plentiful and cheap. I had my main meal of the day at my employer's
> cafeteria, which was heavily subsidised as appears to be common in
> France, so I could get a steak, salad, dessert, and a half-bottle of
> wine for something like 10 francs. Then I'd be OK with a simple sandwich
> in the evening. Now and then I'd go to a restaurant for a change, but
> even there good food was cheap when compared with Australian restaurants.
>
> The wine gave me problems, though. A good thing about Australian wine is
> that even the cheap stuff is drinkable, provided that you avoid the real
> horse **** at the bottom of the scale. Good French wine is remarkably
> good, as we all know, but bad French wine is abominably bad, and you
> need some expertise or local knowledge to know what to avoid. I never
> had bad wine at a restaurant, but I had some bloody awful stuff from the
> supermarket. It cleaned out my drains good and proper.

On my recent trip to France we drove down to an area we were in three years
ago because the grandchildren wanted to revisit a particularly nice bathing
place. We had lunch at a small restaurant above the bar in the village of
Meyrals where we had eaten several times before. Lunch was still EUR 10 for
four courses the same as it was in 2003. Freshly made soup brought in a
tureen so you take as many helpings of it as you wanted, a sizeable piece of
rillette with a couple of cournichons, a chicken leg with frites and salad,
a choice of desserts and a bottle of anonymous but palatable wine among the
three adults. Coke for the two children and coffee for the adults came to
an extra EUR 7.50. Cheap indeed.
--
Nick Spalding