In the little less than a year it's taken to send food prices for even the most bog-standard staples skyward and for the recession to bite us back, we have had to go back to what we once knew best - to cooking for even special occasions without spending our entire week's food budget. Conspicuous consumption has become a form of vulgarity. Now we don't talk labels and luxury foods so much as how little we have spent and how slowly we have cooked it. We are becoming wallet-wise in the kitchen.

While the world doesn't exactly await or need yet another cookbook, I am optimistic that the words "prescient" and "zeitgeist" may still apply to Supper For A Song. I have actually lived it and cooked the book since last summer in the west of Ireland and I have never had such fun, given more splendid lunches, suppers, dinners and weekends, nor had so many compliments, foodily speaking, while no longer feeling queasily uneasy about the gaping hole in my pocket.

"Something Out Of Nothing" became a way of life and a chapter in the book, but the hair shirt was definitely off. I truly believe I learned to cook and eat better and that none of the recipients, the friends and family at my table, started Chinese Whispers about what a cheapskate I was or went home hungry. In fact, I have had more requests for the recipes than ever before. "Perhaps the biggest beneficiary of the crunch is the cookbook industry," suggested Rebecca Seal in the Observer in March. So, far from curbing our food spending power, we are being led back into the kitchen with the tools that many of the baby-boomer and below generations were never armed with, cookbooks for our times. This same article declared that sales of basic raw ingredients are soaring as shoppers cut their bills by giving up ready meals, and that sales of Sunday roasts are up 44 per cent this year in one of the larger supermarket chains, likewise recipe cards for a basic beef stew which resulted in a 2,000 per cent increase in sales. The food sector is the only one in retail that is growing, albeit at a snail's pace.

But there is work to be done and lessons to be learned. We don't know what to do with the snout-to-tail cuts, how to recycle left-overs, look in the fridge and the larder for tonight and tomorrow's dinner, reincarnate, réchauffer, reinvent and not waste. We have to learn to cook the cuts and comestibles that our parents and grandparents loved and lived on and to wean our children off ready-made heat-and-eat culture.