What celebrity chefs such as Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Heston Blumenthal have been trying to do for years has finally been achieved - our apparently limitless appetite for ready meals seems to have been sated.

The sale of convenience food rose by 300% in the past decade, but now supermarkets are reporting huge increases in demand for raw ingredients - Asda says sales of economy white potatoes have risen by an astonishing 3,017% in a year.

According to experts, it no longer makes financial sense to spend £4.50 on a single serving of lasagne, however convenient it may be, when for £3.50 you can buy a pack of decent braising steak.

This new frugality has various consequences: first, people are cooking more and eating out less. At Morrisons, sales of the ingredients for Sunday roasts are up 44% on the year; at Asda, beef kidney sales are up 74% and pork shoulder 58%. When Sainsbury's featured basic beef chunks on an in-store recipe card, purchases rose by 2,000%. Tesco brought pork hocks back last year after a 10 year absence and sales doubled in six months. Early this year, there was even an unexpected run on onions.

Food is the only retail sector that is growing, albeit very slowly, according to the British Retail Consortium.

There is also evidence that people are shopping more carefully. According to a report by marketing consultant Futurelab for budget supermarket Aldi, 43% of shoppers have started taking a list with them, and 29% have started using coupons. Many have also returned to doing one big shop a month - and it isn't just cash-strapped parents: a quarter of 16- to 24-year-olds are now bulk buyers.

"I've started soaking barley overnight and making soups to take to work," says Katherine, 25, a fashion merchandiser. "I'm single but I make enough for four and stick it in the freezer. I reckon I save about £40 a week."

It seems that people are cooking like their grandparents, whose stews and hotpots are suddenly the trendiest things to make. But, of course, everyone needs to know how to make them. Perhaps the biggest beneficiary of the crunch is the cookbook industry. Next month sees the arrival in the UK of 4 Ingredients, which was last year's biggest selling recipe book in Australia, with sales of 800,000. The premise is simple and timely: fewer ingredients mean less expense.

Bloomsbury has a thrifty cookbook out later in the year, 476 Ways to Eat Well with Leftovers, and one of the biggest surprises in publishing recently was when Gill Holcombe's How to Feed Your Whole Family a Healthy Balanced Diet, with Very Little Money and Hardly Any Time, Even If You Have a Tiny Kitchen, Only Three Saucepans ... sold 35,000 copies and counting, even though it comes from a tiny publishing house and was written by an unknown author with almost no publicity. Average sales for a cookbook from a major publishing house are 15,000 to 20,000.

The Guardian 16/3/09