I revisited Delia’s Frugal Food — could it save me cash 50 years on?

I don’t know when I became a person who thought it was interesting to comment on the price of butter. I used to think about big things: politics, global instability. Now I think about butter. I think about the price of butter every day; actually, the price of a regular food shop haunts me. 

In my work as a cookbook writer, I think about it professionally; as a person with both expensive taste and a mortgage, I think about it personally. What does it mean that it’s all so expensive, and what will we do if it gets more expensive? So it was fortuitous that, kicking around a second-hand bookshop, I found a copy of Delia Smith’s Frugal Food. The classic cookbook was first published in 1976, to help people cook healthy food on a budget. 

Fifty years on, when the cost of living is once again on our minds, how does this landmark book fare? Surprisingly well, actually. “The fact is,” Delia announces, at the top of the very first page, “I feel our days of unrestricted choice in eating are strictly numbered. There simply isn’t enough food on this planet to feed all the people who live on it.”

Delia Smith became a household name in the 1970s Ian Showell/Keystone/Getty Images

I cannot imagine a cookbook writer of today — certainly not one with Delia’s cosy household stature — opening with something so bold and uncompromising. There will, she says simply, “be less food around”. She softens it a little by adding “at least, of the kind we have been accustomed to”, which is, one comes to realise, partly the point of the book. 

This is a manual for a new way of living that never quite came to pass — or might have taken 50 years to arrive. Because today it is now absolutely undeniable that Delia was both brave and entirely correct. “It would be unrealistic to think of the future of meat as anything but doubtful” is her opening salvo to the meat-based chapters; “if we can’t have meat in the future, then let’s not pretend we can — let’s evolve in a more realistic direction”, she says, urging farmers to grow lentils and people to embrace pulses and grains of all kinds.

This is bolder than it seems: Delia’s 1976 audience requires handholding through cooking plain pasta, and she speaks to those who may still “be nervous about cooking rice”. Incidentally, her method for cooking rice — by volume, with zero stirring, and letting the rice entirely absorb the water, ideally with some buttered onions, chicken stock and a cinnamon stick — is the best method, and one that is startlingly Ottolenghi-adjacent.

Actually, many recipes in Frugal Food turn out to be unsettlingly modern. Was Delia ahead of her time, or did we simply forget how to cook like this for a little while? The stereotype of boring British cooking has always baffled me. Pizza and dal, Delia promises here, are both easy and delicious.

Delia Smith in 1973Alamy

My grandmother, who sent my mother to school in Stoke-on-Trent in the Sixties with hummus and pizza for lunch, has never recognised British cooking as boring. For my omnivore grandfather, she boiled whole pig’s heads over a gas ring in the bath. She learnt these things from cookbooks. 

Frugal Food, then, is not such an outlier as it seems; we have to learn the same lessons over and over again. Perhaps this is why Delia’s advice, and writing, are as sound as ever. Grow herbs! Go hard on the freshly ground black pepper! Cider is cheaper than wine! Use the oven to cook multiple things at once! Food waste is disgraceful and stupid! Eat your leftovers! And, of course, “if you’ve got an attractive tureen full of comforting, inviting homemade soup on the table — with homemade bread, butter, a hunk of cheese and some fruit — who’s going to notice the absence of meat?”

Some messages have aged less well. Delia, later famous for teaching Brits How To Cheat At Cooking (2008) with frozen mash and Jus-Rol pastry, is here fairly scathing about “working wives and mothers stocking up on instant puds, apple pies, sponge cakes, frozen hamburgers, fish fingers and packaged meat”. Instant foods and “super gadgets” get short shrift; as, too, does the “bored, liberated housewife”, who “needs a job to pay for her labour-saving home”. I think I speak for the “liberated housewife” community when I say that I like both my job and my dishwasher (although admittedly I can’t get behind the frozen hamburgers). 

Her anti-freezer stance is, perhaps, a little striking 50 years later: notably, she worries that having one encourages families to buy whole sides of meat, and thus they will be “landed with far more heads, tails and ears” than they could possibly eat. My freezer, full as it is with leftovers, chicken stock and Calippos, is as earless as they come: I find the idea of buying a whole side of beef for the freezer to be unbelievably aspirational. We could use every part of the buffalo! We could live wasteless lives! We could grow things!

Delia, in fact, expects her reader to grow things. “1976 must surely go down as the year Britain took to the spade,” she says. Of course, 1975 was the year of The Good Life, the beloved sitcom about a Surbiton couple aiming for self-sufficiency.

john nyugen/jnvisuals

While Delia doesn’t go so far as to suggest that the reader abandon her job and pick up a trowel, she certainly assumes that even the busiest working reader is likely to have a “glut of marrows” for cheap eating in the summer months.

She expects, in fact, more from her reader on all fronts than a cookbook writer might safely assume today. “First make the pastry, and line a tin with it” is a typical instruction: sometimes with quantities given, sometimes not. My mother was taught to make pastry at school (“short sharp strokes running forward”); but 20 years later, my “food tech” lessons were mostly preoccupied, as I recall, with analysing the packaging for a Ginsters Cornish pasty. 

Yet Delia is right; if we are to live reasonably in an era marked by food instability we will need to be able to cook and, those who can, will need to grow too. Who better to teach than the great Delia Smith? She is, after all, fantastic on the sentence level: a comfortable and funny presence in the kitchen with you. “Well actually the egg and I are great companions,” begins the chapter Eggs And Us. A chapter entitled Who Needs Meat?  begins, sternly: “I do.”

“Chicken,” she admits, “is a problem.” Still true: she worries about battery hens but concedes they are often the only way to feed meat to many people. “In the interests of frugality, go back to the days when chicken was a treat by having fewer but better-flavoured ones,” remains a fantastic point, although her suggestion to “make up the shortfall by having rabbit once in a while” swiftly leads me into a £14 bill at the butcher. 

The rabbit stew, though, is blissful: silky and rich and deep. (I like my men like I like … etc.) Today, a chicken from that same butcher is £24; supermarket chicken has undercut the prices of butcher chicken to such a degree that it’s now hard to remember what meat is supposed to cost. “Supposed to cost” is a complicated question, when we are talking about food. Of course, a straight comparison of prices between 1976 and 2026 shows a dizzying increase: the average price of a block of butter climbs from 20p in 1976 (£1.37 adjusted for inflation) to £2.43 today. 

A Tesco shopper in 1973FRANK BARRETT/KETSTONE/HULTON ARCHIVE/Getty IMAGES

Yet it’s not so simple: if you look through Hansard, over the past hundred years, both the Commons and the Lords repeatedly circle back to the same point: what’s to be done about the price of butter? What should food cost, and who should pay for it? This, then, is the central question. The average household spends just over 11 per cent of their budget on food; in 1976, it was double that. We spend half of what our mothers and grandmothers used to, and we expect much more for it. Producing food at scale, and even more crucially, in a way that is sustainable, is neither easy nor cheap. 

Dairy farmers are losing thousands a day to keep milk prices artificially low; meat prices in supermarkets are low because the animals are kept in ways that are deeply unsustainable (not to mention unethical). Our fruit and vegetables — according to a government white paper, and as any close-reading trip round the supermarket will tell you — are largely imported. Meanwhile international shipping grows increasingly insecure. When a container-load of onions fell off a ship and bobbed up on Brighton beach earlier this year, it only highlighted the absurdity. The onions had to be binned, of course, because the seas are full of sewage. 

Britain is far from food-secure, and if we want food security, we have to get used to paying for it. We have to support the people who grow and produce food; and be more clever with what they give us. We have to be as competent and as resourceful and as interested as Delia believed we were 50 years ago: we have to understand that there is, in fact, nothing bigger than butter. 

Herby lentil, bean & anchovy salad with jammy egg

From left: rabbit in cider, herby lentil, bean and anchovy salad, and fidget pieJohn Nguyen/JNVisuals

This is the secret star of the show. Delia’s terse little introduction to her version — “a very inexpensive lunch dish for four people along with some crusty bread to mop up the juices” — still sent me rifling through the kitchen. You could make this cheaper by soaking the beans and cooking the lentils yourself: I’m never that organised. 2026 is, according to some nutritionists, the “year of the bean”: may I recommend this as a way in? 

Ingredients

• 500g jarred haricot beans
• 400g tin green lentils
• 1 tin anchovies
• 4 eggs
• 2 tbsp chopped black olives 
• small bunch parsley
• small bunch dill 
• (very) small bunch coriander
• 2 tsp Dijon mustard
• 2 tsp white wine vinegar
• optional: 2 tsp olive oil 
• 1 garlic clove, crushed
• salt and pepper 
• chilli flakes if liked

Method

1. Bring a pan of water to the boil; drop in the eggs, and set a timer for 5 minutes 30 seconds.
2. In a large mixing bowl, stir together the mustard, crushed garlic, white wine vinegar and the oil from your anchovies. If your anchovies aren’t very oily, add a little extra olive oil. Season to taste.
3. Finely chop your herbs, stems and all. Add into the mixing bowl, reserving a few fronds of dill for the top. 
4. Drain your white beans and green lentils, and rinse thoroughly.
5. Mix. Decant onto a serving platter. Stud with black olives and anchovies.
6. Plunge the eggs into cold water, and peel. Set each egg into the salad, and split in half to reveal beautiful jammy yolks.
7. Season with salt, plenty of black pepper, and reserved dill fronds. 

Rabbit in cider (adapted freely)

Tracking down a rabbit is by far the most complicated part of this one-pot wonder. Chicken would be cheaper, and easier, but less fun to show off about. And the rabbit really is wonderful. Get a butcher to joint it for you. (Don’t look at the head, which is the only squeamish moment.)

A note on dried mushrooms: pound for pound, you get what you pay for. Fresh mushrooms may seem cheaper, but dried mushrooms pack an unbelievable punch for their weight: 15g of dried will do the same job, flavourwise, as a whole punnet of fresh. Both — if you can do it — bring something special to the party. 

With a side this serves about six

Ingredients

• 1 rabbit, jointed (or 8 chicken thighs)
• 225g cubed pancetta or lardons 
• 2 medium white onions, finely chopped
• 4 garlic cloves, minced 
• 3 sprigs thyme
• 15g dried mushrooms (either wild or porcini) 
• 100g fresh “dark-gilled” mushrooms, thinly sliced
• 275ml dry cider
• 275ml chicken stock (Delia makes her own rabbit stock with the head; I make mine from a cube)
• 1 old-fashioned tablespoon plain flour 
• black pepper 

Method

1. Soak the dried mushrooms in the cider and warm stock.
2. Add the pancetta to a shallow casserole dish (one with a lid, ideally), and set it over a medium heat. Make sure the pancetta is in the pan before it goes on the heat: we want to render out as much fat as possible. Cook slowly for 5-10 minutes, until crispy, then move to the side of the pan. There should be plenty of fat; if not, add a splash of oil, or a teaspoon of lard. 
3. Throw in the rabbit joints, and season generously with black pepper. Go easy on the salt. Brown on all sides; then add the onions, and garlic, and cook for 10 minutes further. Add the flour, and stir to coat. Depending on the size of your pan, you may find it easier to lift the rabbit out; add the flour to everything else, stir, and return the rabbit to the pan. 
4. Add the fresh mushrooms; pour over the dried mushroom-cider-stock mixture. Pepper again. Lid on; heat right down. Cook for 45 minutes with the lid on; then, if necessary, reduce for 15 minutes. Taste for salt. Serve immediately. 

Citrus & coriander condensed milk cake

Originally “snipped out of the Evening Standard by a reader in 1940”, Delia tells us that this Sugarless Sultana And Orange Cake became popular again in the sugar crisis of the 1970s. Tender-crumbed and unbelievably easy, this spiced version should have a third lease of life in the 2020s.

To minimise food waste, this recipe starts by multiplying Delia’s original to take in the whole can of condensed milk, then adds all the orange juice (same reason, plus flavour), plus some extra spices: a gentle heat from black pepper and floral notes from pleasingly citrus-y coriander bring this right up to date. This recipe makes one loaf cake, plus 8-12 little cakes — depending on the size of your tins.

Ingredients

• 150g salted butter
• 1 375ml can condensed milk 
• 3 eggs, beaten until frothy
• 350g self-raising flour
• 2 oranges, zest and juice 
• 1.5-2 tbsp coriander seed, finely ground
• 2 tsp black pepper, finely ground 
• Optional: blueberries, 10g cold butter

Method

1. Grease and line a 1lb loaf tin; and butter and line an 8-12 fairy cake/muffin/cannelé tin. Pre-heat the oven to 180C fan.
2. Beat the salted butter until light and fluffy; slowly pour in the condensed milk and keep beating.
3. Sift the flour, and add the coriander seed and black pepper (as liked). Zest in the oranges, and stir. A pinch of salt here, if you’re not using salted butter.
4. In turn, add a little egg, then a little flour, to the fluffy butter. Repeat until all incorporated in a smooth batter. 
5. Pour into the prepared tins. (To the small ones, I added some blueberries that were past their best, but it could hardly be called frugal. To the larger one, I thinly sliced 10g of very cold butter, and laid it down the centre of the loaf tin, for a picture-perfect crack.) 
6. Bake: the big one for about 45 minutes, until it shrinks away from the sides; and get the little ones out after 25 minutes. 

Ella Risbridger is the author of Midnight Chicken (& Other Recipes Worth Living For) and The Year of Miracles (recipes about love + grief + growing things)

The Kitchen Book, by Ella Risbridger, will be published by the 4th Estate in May and is available for pre-order now