I love old cookery books. Especially those written in the late 1930’s to the 1950’s. These fragile, fusty books evoke a time where vegetable seed sowing charts cosied up beside tips for ‘How to use up the meat on a ham bone when it gets dry and uninteresting’.

I might look like a high maintenance kind of girl, but its austerity that kick starts my creativity and cooking on a budget using ideas from the past, when everyone practised household economies and grew their own food seems really apposite today.

Maura Laverty, who has been described as ‘The Mammy of Irish Cooking’ wrote a book called ‘Kind Cooking’ in 1955. And whilst many women of that generation were applying their lipstick and putting on a clean apron before the man of the house came home for supper, Maura was helping those women with recipes for quick suppers.

I was intrigued. Would Maura’s recipes help me now? A woman with a passion for lipstick, glamour and gardening? Well, three cheers for Maura! This recipe is still fabulous and economical after 58 years!

A bottle of Prosecco adds some glitz to the pie and will turn it into a great Friday night supper.

For the recipe for Maura Laverty’s Sausage Pie, click here.