Introduction

The Pauper’s Cookbook was my very first published book, appearing as a Penguin paperback original in 1971. Jill Norman, my brilliant editor, was dubious about my choice of title, unconvinced that potential readers would recognize or approve of its tongue-in-cheekiness. I argued that it was catchy, got the message across succinctly without the dismal connotations of words like ‘budget’, or ‘economy’. Besides, I urged, pauperishness was not the shameful state it might once have been; sixties hippies had made poverty into something of a mantra, an anti-materialistic stance, sharing their macrobiotic messes as readily as they passed round their spliffs. A recent pauper myself, trawling through libraries and my friends’ bookshelves for thrifty but attractive recipes for my family, I was confident that the people I was writing for - students, nurses, young marrieds, as well as hippies - would get the point and the joke. Jill allowed herself to be persuaded and my small paperback was launched: a rustic dish of ‘pork and beans’ on the cover, more than 120 ‘international, racially mixed and classless dishes promising good home cooking at Joe’s Café prices’, according to the blurb, all for a mere 60p. Three minutes airtime on the World at One, parrying some shrewd but not unkindly sallies from Bill Hardcastle - ‘So tell me about these limpet stovies, Jocasta Innes, is this a regular pauper’s dish?’ - ensured a run on my book in the first few weeks, after which that precious aid word-of-mouth took over.