You are lucky these days if you have a good butcher on your doorstep, because this dwindling trade is where you will find the best meat bargains. Mine, Macken Brothers in Turnham Green Terrace, West London, is famous for its Scottish beef, rare-breed pork and home-made sausages but, if you know what to ask for, there are plenty of inexpensive, old-fashioned cuts too.

Generally, the cheaper cuts come from the well-worked part of the animal's body, the muscles and fattier meat in the front quarter. Most, but not all, need longer, slower cooking than the more familiar lean cuts that grill in minutes, but end up tastier because as it cooks the fat lubricates the meat. These slow-cooked dishes, lovely stews and aromatic curries, always taste better heated up the next day. Others, such as stuffed heart, braised beef tongue and even pig's ears, are already on fashionable menus but, as we tighten our belts, these and other unfamiliar cuts, such as scrag, clod and sticking, flank and Jacob's ladder, will become just as familiar as sirloin, rump and loin.

Take pork. Next time you see Gloucester Old Spot on sale, ask for the hand and spring, an old-fashioned joint that usually finds its way into sausages. It joins shoulder to belly, costs about £5 and feeds 4-6 people. It suits slow-roasting, or being chopped and gently stewed. The thick end of the belly is a smaller roasting joint, which feeds 4 people for about £8. The rib joint, also known as the collar joint, is another good one, which some butchers bone and roll for slow roasting or pot-roasting. Barbecue ribs and belly slices are fatty but very meaty, extremely tasty and very cheap. They are also good steamed. Simply cut into chunks, rub with seasoning and steam for about 10 minutes. The juices will amalgamate with the melted fat to make a sauce. Spare rib chops don't look as neat as regular ones and suit slower cooking but, at £5.98 a kilo compared with £7.50, who cares?

The extremities - trotters, ears, snout and tail - offer all sorts of possibilities but involve quite a bit of work. Trotters, for example, could be boned and stuffed zampone-style and eaten with lentils, or in a Marco Pierre White way with wild mushrooms, but are worth 50p each to give body and flavour to soups and stews.

Curiosity is driving me to try Anissa Helou's pig's snout, ears and tail stew with peas from her book The Fifth Quarter. This and Fergus Henderson's Nose to Tail Eating are treasure troves of ideas for offal. I'd also like to put in a word for butchers' sausages (Mackens' contain 85 per cent meat), which can be turned into meatballs, used to stuff cabbage, and cooked with lentils and other legumes. Cured sausage is a useful way of using a small amount of meat to inject plenty of flavour into quickly cooked stews, particularly those made with dried beans.

Supply and demand, though, is likely to push up the price of even modest cuts. Not long ago, my butcher couldn't give away lamb shanks. Suddenly there was a huge demand, because a recipe for cooking them with balsamic vinegar was published in the River Café Cook Book. Now they cost £3 and he regularly runs out.

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