author : Jocasta Innes

In The Pauper’s Cookbook she has assembled a wealth (or should it be a poverty?) of recipes for meals costing between ten and twenty pence per head. Her collection of international, racially mixed and classless dishes promises good home cooking at ‘Joe’s Café’ prices.

Some of the worst cooks waste hours on research: but The Pauper’s Cookbook bypasses all that. You simply assess the ‘cooking situation’ and turn up the recommended treatment. The ffortescue-Smyths – or your parents – might call for Fancy Work; young Tomlinson and his dolly-bird, Fast Work; but the Joneses and all those children of theirs come in for Standards and Padding, including reconditioned leftovers. Thrifty tips on Programmed Eating (a week's meals at one session), on not eating (or dieting), and on Private Enterprise (or make-it-yourself) help to cut the costs; and Jocasta Innes starts right where the trouble begins – in the shops.

So leave it to the affluent to court indigestion at the Waldorf-Ritz: here’s how to live it up in your own squalid tenement without recourse to poaching, rustling, guddling, scrumping or shop-lifting.