"The original £1 food-menu pub," says a sign outside the Four Crosses Inn near Cannock, Staffordshire. The claim may be a contentious one, as more and more pubs offer incredibly cheap meals to stave off closure, but the owner, Tony Rabbitts, insists that he was the first to show it could be done.

"At first it was one day a week, but it filled the place up so we went up to two, then five, and now seven days a week," he says. "We'd been struggling to pay the bills and would have had to close, but we refused to be beaten."

From serving about 30 lunches a day, Rabbitts is now doing more than 300 at busy times, and bar takings have increased fourfold.

"We've got regulars who come back every day. Some people come seven days a week. One woman was having her kitchen refitted and hasn't bothered having her cooker put in yet."

Minibuses full of pensioners have started coming from Wolverhampton for lunch and a day out. There is a roaring fire, the restaurant area is filling up with New Year's Day diners by 12.30, and, annoyingly, today, the minced beef and onion pie has already run out.

The starters and desserts are all £1; the basic main courses are also £1, but there is a "homemade" option for £1.50 and a roast for £2.50. David Borton, a regular diner, calls the final option "going large".

I choose vegetable soup, meatballs and chips, and Christmas pudding with custard. It's £3 for the lot. The soup and the pudding are fine; the meatballs, which come in gravy, are spongy in texture and indeterminate in origin. There may be some pork in there, somewhere.

Rabbitts says the £1 meals cost about 30p for him to produce; the £1.50 meals double that. Going large may be a wise move. But let's not carp.

"This pub would have gone to the wall without the cheap meals," explains Borton. "I come three days a week, and I've never had a bad meal here yet. It's absolutely brilliant and the atmosphere now is great." Pete Bellis, a lorry driver, chips in: "I saw the sign as I was passing and thought there had to be a catch. What else can you buy for one pound?"

I next go north for dinner in Boroughbridge, where the Blue Bell Inn is advertising "North Yorkshire's first £1 credit-crunch menu". Says the pub's garrulous website: "In these hard times we like to give a little back to the community."

The menu at the Blue Bell looks tempting: cottage pie, lasagne, home-made chilli and chips, pasta bake, and sausage, mash and gravy - all for £1 each. The desserts - toffee apple fudge cake and ice cream, chocolate cake, apple pie and custard, rice pudding, plum pie - are another quid. There's just one problem. The pub's not doing any food tonight.

This is deeply upsetting, after a 16-mile car ride from York. "I've given the wife the night off," says Andy Jeffery, the landlord. The Blue Bell, inspired by the success of the Four Crosses, has been doing cheap meals since November.

"Like every other pub in the area we're suffering at the moment with the recession," says Jeffery. "We had to do something. I stood outside the pub, looked at it and went, 'what is going to get me in this pub?'" He decided the offer of meals at the magic price of £1 was the answer.

Will it work? "If it doesn't, we won't be here," he says. "The biggest problem is ... people think there's a catch. They just can't believe we're doing it. We've had people come in and say, 'do we have to buy a bottle of wine with the food to get it for a pound?' People assume it's crap food or small portions. OK, they're not massive portions, but as far as we can, it's home-cooked, decent, food."

All this analysis, sadly, is theoretical. Dinner is two pints of Pedigree. A bitter experience.

Undeterred, I take the train next morning to Inverness, where the award-winning Clachnaharry Inn has introduced a Scottish version of the £1 credit-crunch special: mince and tatties, fish pie, shepherd's pie, stovies. I have no idea what tatties and stovies are, but am at least reasonably confident that they will be served.

When I get to the lochside inn after a seven-hour journey, lunch indeed is being served. But there is a worrying absence of large placards proclaiming the offer of the £1 special. Instead the pub is offering a "meal deal" with some items priced at a pound but others edging back towards the old prices - fish pie at £1.75, mince and tatties (potatoes, why does everyone in the pub look at me when I ask what those are?) at £1.95, steak pie and chips at a vertiginous £3.50.

"We did the pound menu for the month before Christmas," says the owner, Charlotte Boyle. "Everything was doom and gloom, and I thought we had to address the situation. This was a way of protecting staff's jobs a wee bit, keeping their morale going, and targeting a market that is going through a difficult time financially."

Boyle plans to relaunch the £1 menu this month, but says it's not feasible to offer everything at that price. "We couldn't keep it going at a pound ... in any case, it loses its momentum. You have to keep reinventing things."

I do, though, manage to eat - for a £1 - the pub's signature dish, of stovies and oatcakes, which is still on at that price.

The person serving me doesn't know what stovies are, but Boyle enlightens me. "Stovies are leftovers. That one's got corned beef, potatoes and onions in it, but you can really make stovies out of anything. Historically, it's poor man's fodder."

History, of course, has caught up with us.

What else you can buy for a quid

• A pint of Greene King IPA or bottle of San Miguel at Wetherspoon pubs (99p)

• A 750ml bottle of Duchy Selections Royal Deeside sparkling mineral water (99p)

• Kellogg's Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, at Asda

• One Lotto ticket

• A computer mouse from Poundland

• 0.23ml of La Prairie Skin Caviar Luxe Cream (priced at £215.31 for 50ml at Harrods)

• Single bus fare in London, with an Oyster card