Ten years on, tins still causing trouble

Another brief post about Back in Time for Dinner on BBC2, which is proving to be fascinating and amusing in equal measure. The second episode saw the Robshaw family fast-forwarded through to the sixties, experiencing huge changes in what and how people ate as the decade progressed. But mum Rochelle was still struggling in the kitchen, with a can of corned beef proving a particular challenge. To be fair, they aren't the easiest of tins to get into, so it came as no surprise that Rochelle managed to snap off the key, but she also made incredibly hard work of using a butterfly-style opener on it instead, which replaced the more primitive-looking one from last week in her newly updated 1960s kitchen.

In the end she resorted to prising the top off with a knife and scraping out the contents, miraculously avoiding any injuries. Oddly, the voice-over said that corned beef hash was on the menu, but from the shots of her cooking, and the family eating it the finished dish, it was quite clearly a corned beef stew. I think it's a case of the programme-makers making a mistake there though, rather than Rochelle getting the recipe really badly wrong...

Despite the newfound freedom many women discovered in the sixties though, things didn't always change that quickly for everyone, and Rochelle still found that she was spending a huge amount of her time at home in the kitchen. As one of her daughters commented though, "To be honest, maybe it was good you being in the kitchen for longer, because you can learn how to open the cans".

In the rest of the episode, the family enjoyed a trip to a supermarket, the new-fangled modern way to shop in the 60s, its shelves stocked with everything you could ever want in one place, including a huge array of tins all decked out in vintage labels.

Rochelle also had assistance from Hairy Biker Dave Myers to prepare a "garland of peas" - a large quantity of tinned peas set in gelatine in a ring mould, which sounds so delightfully retro I am quite tempted to have a go at myself some time - watch this space! In the meantime though, I'm looking forward to the remaining episodes of the series, which will presumably see Rochelle failing to use an electric can opener in the 80s, or snapping off a ring-pull in the 90s.