I can't help thinking that someone is missing a trick here. Where is The Great Big Book of Miserliness? Or The Joys of Parsimony? Or the bestseller I'm planning to whip out, Last Into the Pub: How Not to Buy Your Round? Maybe it's just a matter of time, because two years ago nobody would have guessed that the next hot publishing trend would be that most fusty and old-fashioned of virtues: thrift.

The Great Big Book of Miserliness? Or The Joys of Parsimony? Or the bestseller I'm planning to whip out, Last Into the Pub: How Not to Buy Your Round? Maybe it's just a matter of time, because two years ago nobody would have guessed that the next hot publishing trend would be that most fusty and old-fashioned of virtues: thrift.

But thrift is back. It's been taken out of its box in the attic, dusted down and with no irony whatsoever dressed up between glossy new covers and re-offered to us for prices of up to £14.99. But that's capitalism for you: endlessly inventive and really quite shameless. A bit like India Knight, then, who, just a few years after writing The Shops: How, Why and Where to Shop, kickstarted the genre with The Thrift Book: Live Well and Spend Less, the success of which was entirely predicated on the fact that nobody actually followed her advice to use their local library.

Of the wave of thrift books being published this spring, quite the most useless, but also most enjoyable, is Cold Meat and How to Disguise It: A History of Advice on How to Survive Hard Times (Frances Lincoln £12.99, pp140) by veteran author and journalist Hunter Davies. This rips off another publishing trend: that for retro titles and covers, as deployed by The Dangerous Books for Boys. Except it doesn't just look like an old book; it is an old book. Cold Meat and How to Disguise It was published in 1904 and for the cover art, Davies's publisher has simply scanned his copy into its computers.

This is brilliant when you think about it. Why bother coming up with new books when you can simply recycle old ones? Exactly the kind of economy that Davies so admires. This is the book Davies was born to write. He's a hoarder by nature, a collector, and to research this project he simply raided his bookshelves for old leaflets and books, turning up titbits such as an 1891 recipe for "lark's pie" and a 1940 one for "sheep's head broth". There's a set of instructions on how to make a Hawaiian guitar, a "bread and butter slimming diet" from 1938 and a slightly disconcerting set of illustrations from a booklet offering advice on "self- massage for men and for women".

Let it not be said that Davies shies away from stating the obvious. Nylons, apparently, were scarce in the Second World War, and were sold on the black market. Really? Well I never. And he's not one to go out of his way with unnecessary research: if it's not on his bookshelves, it's not here. At one point, he calls the book "social history", which it is, but as dispensed by a kindly old uncle.

Because it's Davies who is the star of the book. He peppers the text with recollections and in chapter 10 comes clean about his own thriftiness: "Rotting fruit is a challenge to me. I test all the apples or pears or plums in a bowl first and always pick the soggiest, oldest, mouldiest to eat... I don't think I've had any brand new clothes for years, except Christmas presents." He even reveals: "I always have my bath after my wife has had her bath, using the same water". Which does all seem excessively self-denying for Wayne Rooney's ghostwriter.

But back to the cold meat. Here's the advice from the original book: "A person of average intelligence can easily learn how to make a great variety of dishes from the remains of cooked joints, providing she... is careful never to allow previously cooked meat to reach the heat of boiling water (212F) for this will immediately render it hard, unpalatable and indigestible." Here, in a nutshell, is everything you need to know about The Thrifty Cookbook: 476 Ways to Eat Well With Leftovers (Bloomsbury £14.99, pp256), by Kate Colquhoun. If cooking with fresh meat, you put it in at the start; if cooking with leftovers, you put it in at the end. Et voilà! Plus, you know, make breadcrumbs from stale bread and stock from leftover chicken bones and, in case you were confused, cheese on toast from cheese and toast.

Still, I like Colquhoun's attitude to "best before" labels (sniff it and if it's not off, cook it) and there are some enticing recipes for things such as spicy carrot pickle. But although Colquhoun dispenses the odd mini-lecture ("I don't think many of us realise how much food we throw away, but the statistics are astonishing: 6.7 million tonnes a year and rising"), there's no getting away from the fact that these are just recipes. Recipes that you can make with leftovers, or not, as the case may be.

More genuinely useful for those on a tight budget is Gill Holcombe's How to Feed Your Whole Family a Healthy, Balanced Diet with Very Little Money (Spring Hill £9.99, pp264). It actually first came out back in 2007, but has only really taken off in the last year, selling 45,000 copies, being reprinted five times and earning Holcombe the title of the "credit-crunch Nigella".

I'm not exactly Holcombe's target market. I'm not struggling to feed a family of five on a limited budget and I'm certainly not going to be making fish-finger pie or curried nut roast any time soon. But it's so refreshing to read something, anything, that doesn't insist that cooking is simply about buying the most expensive, best-quality ingredients and then treating them with respect. Her ingredients for hummus and guacamole are quite simply wrong, and her hand is never far away from a jar of gravy granules, but she provides five weeks of recipes that can feed an entire family for amounts ranging from £22.87 to £31.01 per week and prints the till receipts to prove it.

The big difference between this book and all the others is that Holcombe isn't a journalist with an agent and a jolly wheeze. I enjoyed Davies and Colquhoun (just as I'm sure I'll enjoy next month's \Sucking Eggs: What Your Wartime Granny Could Teach You About Diet, Thrift and Going Green (Chatto & Windus £12.99, pp288) by Sunday Times journalist Patricia Nicol). But there's a bit of the Marie Antoinette about them: playing at being poor, rather than actually being so. Holcombe, on the other hand, lost her house in the last recession and her job at the start of this one, and if you want to know what austerity is really like, simply wait until you've got £22.87 for your weekly shop. And eat a slice of fish-finger pie.