In time for summer picnics, the ready-hard-boiled egg will soon be available in Asda and Waitrose. Each egg will cost 45p and it is, says Rob Newell of the Happy Egg Company, “the perfect solution for people who love free-range eggs but don’t have the time or knack to prepare a boiled egg”.

The time or knack? It makes you weep. I’m all for labour-saving but anyone too busy or too stupid to boil an egg has serious problems. If you think you need a pre-boiled egg — or pre-peeled fruit, stock in a bag or ready-to-heat mashed potatoes — what you really need is some heavy-duty therapy or a week in a darkened room, listening to Debussy.

But as I write that, I picture the ghost of Mrs Beeton or Constance Spry leaning over my shoulder and watching me pull slices of bread from a bag, or spoon ice cream out of a Ben & Jerry’s tub. Spry, writing her great cookbook in 1956, acknowledges the usefulness or even superiority of some shop-bought, pre-made foods: tinned tomato juice (because hot countries produce tastier tomatoes), mango chutney, tomato ketchup, anchovy essence and Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce among them. But not much more. I wonder if she felt that she needed time-saving ingredient solutions while she ran her cookery and flower-arranging schools, wrote her books and brought up her son.

Spry points out approvingly that Mr Lea of Lea & Perrins died a millionaire. But, she writes, “the market is now too full [of pre-made foods] for it to be fair to offer encouragement to any student to make her fortune this way”. She could not have been more wrong.

Of course, much has changed in food technology since Spry made her own pickles and jams and deployed her home canning machine. Happy Egg Co’s pre-boiled eggs will stay fresh for eight days in the fridge due to that miracle of packing design, the eggshell. But many other ready-to-eat foods are dependent on technological fixes that involve chemicals: “fresh-cut” fruit is treated with gas to slow the ripening process, then coated with antioxidants such as calcium citrate to keep it from going brown on the shelf. Ready salad has been washed in chlorine (unless it is organic). Those pillow-shaped bags in which it sometimes appears have what the industry politely calls a “modified atmosphere”, as much packed meat does: oxygen is removed and other gases such as nitrogen are added to keep bacteria down.

It is hard creating the illusion of freshness but the tricks don’t have to be disclosed on the label. If they were, people might just buy an apple in its rather effective natural coating, known as “peel”, and cut it up themselves. But that would put a lot of food processing workers out of jobs — and the food manufacturers wouldn’t like it much, either. Obviously enough, they prosper by persuading us to buy new products even if we don’t need them. But what we need and what we buy are separate things, these days.

How does the new “thrift chic” work with this? Food manufacturers have been boasting in recent weeks that the British public, fearful of recession, is buying more ready meals than ever. We already buy more than the rest of Europe put together. Meanwhile, the BBC has just revealed its big autumn cookery series. There are no celebrity chefs involved — the star of this show is the very 2009 notion of spending more carefully. If you watch Economy Gastronomy when it starts at the end of August, you will “slash thousands off your food bill and eat better than ever . . .” so the blurb goes.

I wonder what Spry would have made of that or, indeed, of the British, 50 years after her death: the nation that loves to watch cooking on television but doesn’t really want to cook.

alex.renton@thetimes.co.uk

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