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Mary comments in the programme: “People would say to me: ‘Oh, I could never afford that!’ Mary Berry talked to the Robshaws about her job as a demonstrator for the Electricity Board during the late Fifties, talking up the virtues of new electric cookers. “I was glad to see the back of the Fifties, although it did teach me the joy of buying food from individual shops rather than the supermarket.” "I was in the kitchen, Brandon was out at work and, like most men then, he’d eat his meal alone in the dining room, which he found very isolating. “My experience of the Fifties was that everyone knew their place. “I used our entire week’s meat ration in that one grim liver dinner, but many of the elderly people I work with tell me that despite rationing they simply learned to make food last and that they had plenty to eat. “The banality of the food in the Fifties was a reminder of how lucky we are to have the variety of foods we do today and the gadgets to make cooking less of a chore,” Rochelle continues. The food they cooked and ate was based on the diaries recorded by thousands of families in the government’s National Food Survey which ran from 1950 to 2000.
#Back in time for dinner tv
To make the TV experiment as authentic as possible, the Robshaws wore the clothes fashionable in each decade and the entire downstairs of their terraced home was completely redecorated and remodelled to reflect the average home of each of the five eras. “There were no washing machines or fridges and postwar rationing was still in place which made a woman’s job pretty tough when it came to feeding her family.” “In reality, the average woman in those days did 75 hours of housework a week, and the kitchen was her main workplace. “The 1950s was the decade I was most looking forward to ‘living’ because I had this idea that it would involve baking lots of cakes," says Rochelle, a reminiscence tutor for the elderly. Reflecting all the fads and fashions that have graced our table, Dinner Times is much more than a book about dinner it holds a mirror to our changing family lives.The resulting six-part TV series, Back in Time for Dinner – on our screens next week – gives a fascinating insight into recent history that’s as compelling as it is endearing.
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Who can guess the filling of the first pre-packed sandwich in 1984? And who could have foreseen then that a kitchen robot that can write your shopping list is now just around the corner?
#Back in time for dinner full
Has there ever been a golden age of the family meal? Full of delicious detail, this marvellous companion to the BBC series is rich with nostalgia and provides a feast of extraordinary factual nuggets. And now, nearly twenty years on from the first vegetable-box delivery scheme, we are fatter than ever before. It was not until the mid 1990s that we started to worry about 'five a day'.
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Ten years later, sugar consumption had rocketed: we ate more biscuits for dinner than vegetables and fruit. No one owned a fridge or had seen a teabag, let alone an avocado or a Curly Wurly. In 1950, the average housewife worked a seventy-five-hour week. Do you remember the arrival of the fish finger, the rise and fall of Angel Delight, Vesta curries and Wimpy hamburgers? Did you own a fondue set or host a Tupperware party, or were you starving yourself on the Cabbage Soup Diet? Was life always too short to stuff a mushroom? And what was the point of Nouvelle Cuisine? There has been a revolution in our kitchens.