Introduction

Everybody loves eating expensive food, but extravagant meals often mean crises in greedy households, and lead to eating cheap food which alas, needs far more care and attention to make it really good. Happily people who love cooking like the challenge of making the most of humble ingredients, and positively enjoy turning a plain packet of semolina into a dish of melting, fragrant gnocchi, and this is what the book is about.

Although there is obviously no stopping convenience foods, turning to the shelves of the supermarket does not save you anything but time, since the pre-packed foods have been expensively prepared by other people, however cheaply they may have been bought in their original state, and are lavishly packaged and advertised. And if the people who enjoy feeding their families continue to carry their shopping baskets stead-fastly past the supermarket door, in search of the odder cheap ingredients, then the shops will go on selling them, but if nobody asks for things like belly of pork and breast of lamb they will soon disappear for ever.