Lentil and potato stew with rosemary

There was a month, somewhere in my mid-twenties, when I had ninety euros to get to the end of it and eighteen days in which to do that.

I am not going to dress it up as character-building. It was mostly just boring, and the boring part is the bit nobody mentions: not hunger, which never really turned up, but the administrative tedium of having to think about money every single time you are hungry. I made a spreadsheet. I costed meals to the cent, like a small deranged accountant. And I worked out that a bag of dried lentils, a bag of potatoes, an onion, a head of garlic and a bottle of olive oil came to about six euros and would feed me for most of a week.

This is that stew, and I want to be clear that it is not in the book out of nostalgia. It is here because it is genuinely, almost unfairly good. Lentils and potatoes together do something neither manages alone: the lentils stay whole and give you the protein, the potatoes break down slightly at the edges and thicken the whole pot into something between a soup and a stew, and rosemary makes the flat smell like somewhere that charges money for lunch.

It costs about one euro twenty a portion. That figure is not a boast, it is load-bearing, because food this cheap removes a decision from your week. You stop calculating. You make the pot on Sunday and then there is simply food, and the mental space that frees up is worth considerably more than the money.

Brown or green lentils, not red. Red ones collapse into a purée, which is a different and also excellent dish, but it is not this one.

A lot of black pepper, and a hard drizzle of raw oil at the table.