TIZER, Monster Munch, Wagon Wheels, we are comfort eating our way through the recession and we're seeking out brands from our childhood.

Marks & Spencer knows a thing or two about capturing a national mood. So what are we to make of it when this favourite retailer launches a 75p jam sandwich?

The M&S jam butty arrived just days ago with none of the oozing 'this is not just food' pretentiousness of the company's former ad campaign. It is not created from special Tuscan artisan bread or smeared lovingly with Provencal summer fruit preserve. It's bread, butter and strawberry jam. Just like your mum gave you after you'd skinned your knees.

"We are delighted to be launching this national favourite," says Katy Patino, M&S sandwich specialist. "It really is the ultimate comfort food at an unbeatable price. Plus it's the only place on the high street where you can get a jam sandwich. For those who haven't eaten one for years, one bite takes you straight back to your childhood."

But why would legions of us now be browsing the high streets of Britain in search of something to take us back to our childhood? Because in the throes of recession, we all feel like we have skinned our knees and want mum to put it right.

And look at the other sandwiches in M&S's British classics range - ham and salad cream, coronation chicken and corned beef and pickle. These are bygone butties - the staples of funeral buffets in times of austerity.

"We know that consumers are increasingly looking for great value 'pick me up' food and good old-fashioned British foods are perfect for lightening the mood," says April Preston, M&S's head of product development. "Consumers are also looking for simple flavours they are familiar with to get that 'comfort factor'."

Chocolate may be the ultimate comfort food, which may explain why Cadbury was able to announce a 57 per cent rise in pre-tax profits last year. In among that was the amazing resurrection of the Wispa bar - big in the 1980s, discontinued in 2003 but then relaunched after a huge online campaign by nostalgic chocaholics.

In another blast from the past, Burton's Foods have released a limited run of Wagon Wheels biscuits in 1970's-style gold packaging. Last October, Walkers Snacks relaunched Monster Munch in the packaging we all know from the 1970s and 1980s.

"Consumers made it clear through both our own research and within online communities that they missed Monster Munch the way it used to be," says Dominic South, Monster Munch senior brand manager, adding that the new/old snack would 'appeal to the big kid in us all'.

Iconic

Orangina brought back its iconic 1970s bottle, Birds Eye is pushing the Arctic Roll all over again, and Mars teamed up with Asda to return Starburst, albeit temporarily, to its old name of Opal Fruits.

Tizer was ahead of the game, re-launching in 2007 with a recipe closer to the 1924 original, and with 1980s-style packaging. Fentiman's products - including ginger beer, Victorian lemonade, dandelion and burdock - positively reek of another age. And, in Nelson, Lancashire, the Happy Sweet Shop is doing a roaring online trade selling sherbet Dip Dabs, cinder toffee, Black Jack chews and all the old sweetie favourites to customers as far afield as Australia.

As if to sum up a back-to-basics mood, the February edition of the Observer's Food Monthly magazine trumpeted '50 best recipes ever', across a front cover showing a single slice of cheese on toast.

The 'affluenza' years saw chefs turned into superstars and TV schedules filled with programmes like Masterchef, Hell's Kitchen and Come Dine With Me, fostering the idea that we were all pan-frying monkfish in a star anise sauce every night of the week. Truth is that most of us were just watching the foodies do the hard work on TV while waiting for the microwave to ping on our ready meals.

And even those chefs with the long-winded recipes had their own guilty pleasures, their quick comfort food favourites.

Jamie Oliver loves a fish finger sandwich. Bury-born Simon Hopkinson - whose 1994 book Roast Chicken And Other Stories was voted the best-ever cookery book by a panel of illustrious foodies - once told me that his ideal quick meal is a Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie with Farrow's marrowfat peas. Heston Blumenthal, he of the snail porridge and the molecular gastronomy, confesses he can't resist a tub of supermarket prawn cocktail.

In uncertain times, we indulge our cheap and cheerful guilty pleasures less guiltily. Observers of the Manchester restaurant scene are taking bets on which will be the next top eaterie to go bump. But at the other end of the culinary scale, it's a case of recession - what recession?.

Domino's Pizza sales in the first six weeks of this year were up 15 per cent as people traded down from restaurants to takeaways. KFC has seen sales up 14 per cent and is planning to create 9,000 new jobs in up to 300 new restaurants. Sandwich giant Subway has plans for another 600 stores, creating 7,000 jobs. And European sales for McDonald's were up 7.6 per cent in the last quarter of 2008.

None of which is new. When the recession of the early 1990s began in Wall Street, the local McDonald's installed a baby grand piano and a pianist, put a gloved doorman on duty and watched all the worried finance workers - the so-called masters of the universe - bypass their familiar fancy restaurants to stream through the doors for a cheap, comforting calorie-binge.