Frugal food

This week, the Guardian is running a week-long series of affordable recipes and today's are from Delia Smith. Jolly good they look too - potato, cheese and onion souffle and spiced rhubarb and ginger brulee, although there's some sniping on the Guardian food blog about how much energy the recipes use. In the accompanying article, Delia writes about growing up in a frugal household - in fact, it sounds pretty much like what my mother did: saving dripping from roast meat, using leftovers, cooking offal. When I left university, I bought my first cookery book - Delia's Frugal Food, with a young and rather shy Delia on the cover. I'm pretty sure this was before she'd done any tv. It was a fantastic guide to cooking cheaply, and got me through a dark and cold winter in a Herefordshire cottage.
My copy is now falling apart and covered with the proud decorations of brown splodges from past splashing incidents. The sausage recipes were particulary good, and the only meal I didn't like/cooked wrong was stuffed heart. Of course it's now updated but I'm going to stick with my battered and loved version.