Back In Time For Dinner.

[Harrowden]

The décor etc is well done but the meals featured in the 50's and 60's were just a joke. Did anyone brought up and cooking in those decades find it convincing?

[bhg481]

No, not at all convincing. They appear to have chosen a family that would make "good television" ie, appeal to those with an IQ of 5 or lower. I cannot believe that anyone is too dim to work out how a tin-opener works, to cook an entire week's rations for one meal and to serve liver cold.

[ummmm]

I remember those tin openers but I couldn't use one.

I've only seen bits of it. Wouldn't the programme be boring if the only used domesticated people?

[sherrardk]

I'm enjoying it too - although I wouldn't know how to use that tin opener.

[bhg481]

Naval - yes, she is a teacher but I wouldn't have wanted her teaching my daughter.

Ummmm - I think your last sentence sums it up - they've designed the programme to be "good television" rather then a real experiment.

[Harrowden]

Some of the foods missing: herrings, corned beef, rabbit,wild blackberries . Cooking was certainly not easy but not the "drama" that the programme is trying to portray. Children were also expected to help.

[ummmm]

I wouldn't know, I wasn't born until the 70s :-)

I'm sure that there were some awful cooks in the 50s and 60s.

[bhg481]

It was just silly to choose a woman who doesn't usually cook to take part in a programme where she, as the woman of a 50s/60s home, would have to do the cooking.

[bhg481]

I thought the idea of the programme was that they were trying to replicate/demonstrate life in earlier decades.

[mummybee]

I am enjoying this show- but I hate Giles Coren!!!!!!!!

When I was a wee girl I used to help out all the time with the family chores- the girls of the family are living a charmed life!!!!

[rosyposy]

We are really enjoying this series but I do think the mother is looking more stressed every week. My daughter is now craving the 'Rise and Shine' orange juice, she loved it back in the day as they say. I do have that tin opener in my cutlery drawer and can (but don't) use it, I also have one which was issued in the first world war (I think) now THAT I can't use, it looks like an instrument of torture. :0)

[netibiza]

I didn't help around the house at all, or do the cooking. My one weekly task was to collect 10lb of potatoes in a wicker basket and lug them home.

We always had a mid-week roast and steamed pudding with bacon sometimes (yuk) but mum always cooked a good dinner, and if we had school dinners then at night we would have cheese on toast or soup. The only way I would eat rice pudding was when it had a lovely brown skin on it and welfare orange juice on it!!

[Ann]

Not convincing at all - I know I was there as a child in the 50s! They haven;t mentioned the Prestige pressure cooker which my Mum had around 1955, she made lovely stews in that using cheaper cuts of meat. Nor have they mentioned making dumplings from Fray Bentos suet which was added a few mins before serving it.

What about the salted runner beans which were layed in block salt in a Kilner jar and preserved like this all Winter in the dark pantry under the stairs.

The delicious "Tizer" drink my Grandma used to give us children which we added sugar to as the bibbles went up our nose!

Sugar sandwiches, pink blancmange, jam tarts, spotted dick, jam roly poly made in a muslin, blackberries from the garden made into bramble jelly or blackberry vinegar, the Corona "pop" man bringing Raspberry Cream Soda, the bread man with enormous wicker basket calling at the door with home made bread, Yorkshire pudding which was left over from the main course eaten as a pudding with home made jam on, bread and dripping, cups of steaming Bovril, welfare concentrated orange, but the thing we don't have now is bread and butter eaten with tinned fruit!

[Ann]

//bibbles ?? // bubbles !

[netibiza]

Ann - we were never allowed fizzy drinks - only Bulmers cider , one glass at Christmas! We also had tomato ketchup sandwiches! and in a family with 6 kids and then 2 more later there were never any leftovers!

[netibiza]

and why did they not have to have cod liver oil, and malt??? I loved it by the way although my bros and sisters hated it, we used to be lined up to take it! oh and Bemax sprinkled on cereal, and the ever lovely (posh) Virol, on a spoon, on bread or on a finger, loved it!

[jourdain2]

I was a child in the 50's as well. We ate and lived a lot better than the programme indicates. No-one seems to have taught the mother how to make steamed puddings (filled us up). There was cod roe quite often, apple pies were made from windfalls, we two girls had jobs. From the age of about 7 I did most of the ironing (worked up to it from hankies). We polished the furniture and the brass - took it in turns to put on and polish off - and had to do our whack at weeding, collecting fruit and veg. etc. before being allowed to play-out. We were happy, busy and healthy.