Time travelling tins and pongy pilchards

Last week saw the start of a new series on BBC Two called Back in Time for Dinner, in which an ordinary modern family embarked "on an extraordinary time-travelling adventure, to discover how a post-war revolution in what we eat has transformed the way we live", as presenter Giles Coren told us in the intro to the episode, uncharacteristically expletive-free for once. The Robshaw family spent a week 'living' in each decade from the fifties to the 'naughties', having to "shop, cook and eat their way through history" and experiencing "the culinary fads, fashions and gadgets of each age", with not just the kitchen but the entire ground floor of their house remodelled to reflect how a typical home would have looked in that decade.

The Robshaws in 1950s attire. Plus Mary Berry and cake, as is mandatory for all BBC food programmes

 What they ate at each meal was based on the National Food Surveys of that time, which from 1940 to 2000 was a record of what 8000 families ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner for one week every year. They also had to stick to the traditional family roles of the eras, meaning that in the first episode, mother Rochelle found herself spending much of her time in the kitchen - like a fish out of water, since in real life, husband Brandon does almost all the cooking.

That said, the entire family struggled when it came to using an old-fashioned Yeates-designed can opener on a tin of pilchards for the first meal. Unable to work out how to pierce the rim of the tin and then work round the circumference, Rochelle managed to put a huge dent in its side, the two daughters looked on clueless ("I have no idea what this is...I don't know how to open a normal tin"), and Brandon decided the best thing to do was to jab the tin opener into the top and then gouge out a hole big enough to scoop the contents out of ("Well, I'm doing it in a slightly irregular manner"). With rationed National Bread, dripping, tomatoes and potatoes, for the family it made for rather an eye-opening start to their experiment.

Just as the family were made to wear the clothes of the 1950s, the various food products in their larder were also decked out in the packaging of the time, so it was interesting to note that the label on the tin of pilchards in question, made by Glenrycks, looked almost exactly the same in the fifties as it does today. It's a bold, eye-catching design, so I suppose it makes sense to keep it as it is - other than to add that the company has been producing "quality canned fish for over 75 years", and to attract the health food set, that the product is "high in omega 3", which I doubt anyone had heard of back then. I tried a tin some time ago now, and this seems the ideal opportunity to tell you about it.

I vaguely remember my dad eating a tin of Glenrycks pilchards as part of a weekend lunch many years ago. The memory isn't all that strong, but I can still recall that the smell of them definitely was. I'd like to think I didn't turn my nose up at them quite so defiantly as the son of the family in Back in Time for Dinner, but I know I wasn't at all keen on giving them a try.

With a modern can opener I was able to get into the tin a lot more easily than the Robshaws - and there, straight away, was that almost overpoweringly strong fishy smell that I remember from my youth. These days though it would take an awful lot for me not to try a food, so I was by no means deterred by the pong.

Glenrycks manage to pack in a good few of the pilchards despite the small size of the tin, and plenty of the sauce too. I tried a piece of one of them straight from the tin; the fishy taste is by no means subtle, but not quite as boisterous as the smell suggests it might be. Given the quantity of sauce, I decided that heating the pilchards through before serving them on toast might be the best way to enjoy them to the full.

The sauce struck me as being rather gloopy as I tipped the contents out into a saucepan to heat through, though that is hardly surprising looking at the contents list, which includes tapioca starch and guar gum, whatever that might be, as a thickener. I wasn't expecting quite so much of the fish skin to still be present either - they may be without head and fins, and cooked and ready to eat, but there is no mistaking the fact that the pilchards do still look very...fish-like, not all that far removed from how they came out of the sea. I doubt this would appeal to the many people for whom fish just comes as chunks of tuna in a tin, or at a push, a pre-packaged fillet of something, but the thought of either actually swimming about is perhaps not really something they have thought much about.

With the sauce bubbling nicely, I dished up the pilchards onto toast, opening them out to reveal almost an entirely intact skeleton inside. Of course, bones in tinned fish are not uncommon, and being thoroughly cooked these are completely edible with a soft, almost chalky texture. The very sight of them might well put some people off though. Possibly even more so if you try to remove them, with the spine looking distinctly like some kind of worm, caterpillar or grub - the sort of thing that might get served up to an unsuspecting celebrity in a bush tucker trial.

According to the FAQs on Glenrycks' incredibly informative website though, that's not all that you might find in their products to put you off: small pieces of tail, a seaweed-like substance called "greenfeed" that the pilchards may have been eating before being caught, and even their small, sack-like digestive organs have turned up in tins in the past. The phrase "too much information" is somewhat overused these days, but I think quite appropriate here. You'd think Glenryck might not want to mention all of this. Don't worry though - all such things will be "sterile and harmless though aesthetically displeasing". Quite. If you can stomach it, or indeed endure it, there is a wealth of information on the site about the quality of the fish, the canning process itself, health benefits, and even a page of puzzles, which appear to have nothing to do with pilchards whatsoever but do make for a welcome distraction from all that talk of weird fish parts.

While there was more than enough of the sauce to slather on top of the fish and completely hide the bones (and whatever else might have been there) if so wished, I think Rochelle might have had the right idea by serving the contents mashed up on bread - it does for once look a little more appealing that way. Still, I was perfectly happy to eat mine a little more au naturel, though to be honest the squeeze of lemon and grind of black pepper I added were somewhat lost against the strong taste of the fish and its rich sauce, and I was glad not to have added any salt as they certainly didn't need it. On the whole I thought the pilchards were pleasant enough, and made for a good, cheap light meal - but my flatmate did complain about the smell, just as I had done to my dad many years previously, and probably many more have done, whatever decade they were living in - or pretending to live in, like the Robshaws. As my dad said at the time though, "You don't know what you're missing!" True perhaps, but that said, having read Glenrycks' website, sometimes it's best not to know too much...