When I was at university, many years ago, there was a doubtlessly apocryphal tale about an undergraduate who spent his entire student grant on porridge and succumbed to scurvy before the year was out. I don’t know if the story is still doing the rounds (“What’s a grant?”), but the average student’s diet is still as balanced as a March hare on roller skates, with lager, pizza and kebabs taking the place of the nutritious family meals they were brought up on. It shouldn’t be empty nests that make mothers weep, but the thought of all the rubbish their darlings will be shovelling into their gobs.

Mothers take heart, though, for Ben, Barry and their mates are on your side. They have compiled a cookbook, Sorted, which has attracted the praise of Richard Branson and Duncan Bannatyne, no less. What’s more, by the time you read this, the boys may have already taken their Sorted mobile catering van to your children’s campus during freshers’ week and spread the news that cooking can be fun, wholesome and very, very cheap.

“There are lots of cookbooks out there,” says Ben Ebbrell, in his final year of culinary arts management at Birmingham, “but none written by students for students. When you’ve lived under your parents’ roof for 18 years, and finally get away, you don’t necessarily want to be ringing up all the time and asking how do you cook this or that. There’s something far more credible about listening to fellow students.”

Sorted is just what every student needs, an irreverent primer to the first months of university life, with tips on what to pack, how to budget, how to get drunk and, most importantly, what to eat, from Thai-style tuna burgers at 80p per portion, to chicken, fennel and thyme casserole at £2.60.

“They are all super-easy,” says Ben of the recipes, which are divided into chapters such as “Filling Up” and “Meals to Impress”. “For me, cooking is second nature. I couldn’t understand why other students were struggling and living off baked beans or, worse, takeaways, which cost twice as much and take as long to arrive as it would to cook something more nutritious from scratch.”

The book is a joint effort by Ben and seven school friends who went to various universities. “We all wanted to get some cheap cooking going,” says Richard Smith, the group’s “social secretary” and inspiration behind the drinking games chapter. “You see cookery programmes all the time, and the food looks amazing, but it looks like it costs a fortune. Knowing that Ben was training to be a chef, we were all constantly ringing him to ask what we could do with a tin of tuna.”

So they took themselves off to a holiday cottage with a large open-plan kitchen and tested out their ideas, with Ben devising the recipes, Steve Lau writing the introductions and the rest of the boys providing the entertainment for the Sorted website, which includes synchronised cocktail-making to the soundtrack of Thomas the Tank Engine. “It was important to capture the banter between us, to show people who think of cooking as a chore that it doesn’t have to be like that,” says Barry Taylor, who took all the photographs for the book.

The result is a series of recipes that are straightforward, yes, but also wholesome, foolproof, and include enough cheats to satisfy the laziest cook. Fish chowder condensed soup and crunchy peanut butter may not be conventional ingredients in fish pie or chicken satay, but if cheats like that were good enough for Delia, they’re certainly good enough for our undergraduates. And if it gets them interested in cooking, that’s got to be a good thing.

Sorted is published by Co-incidence Ventures, £12 (www.sortedstudents.com)

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