Further Back In Time For Dinner: 1920s-1940s

1940s: a delivery of veg to make Woolton Pie

I saved these three episodes of Further Back In Time For Dinner to cover all at once, as I figured they'd be the meatiest – no pun intended. I thought the 1940s would be far and away the most interesting, as it's almost certainly the time in history when the national diet underwent the biggest change across all classes in a very short time.

If you ever watched Giles Coren and Sue Perkins doing their Supersizers programmes, or you read many magazines from the 1920s and 1930s, you might be familiar with the brands and even the fads of the day. One of the strengths, for me, of the original Back In Time For Dinner was that they followed actual menus, as recorded in the National Food Survey, which ran from 1940 to 2000. Obviously that wasn't possible for most of the decades covered in this series, so instead there were focuses on trends and events: a cocktail party in the 1920s, a meal cooked entirely from tinned food, and Ryvita and slimming biscuits in the 1930s. It was interesting, but Supersizers did cover that, and I felt it prevented us from getting a really good idea of what people ate day-in, day out. Sticking to the menus gave a better sense of what was normal.

Rochelle wisely stands back from the grenade-like 1930s pressure cooker.

The atypical event I appreciated was the trip to Brick Lane and the Jewish meal afterwards; given Rochelle's Jewish heritage (and, indeed, that of presenter Giles) it would have been very odd had they not acknowledged the politics of the 1930s in some way.

Chicken soup and matzo balls. A Jewish classic.

When it came to the 1940s, the gap between the family's experience and what living at the time must have been like was even more clear. The sheer grind of making do with rationing-size portions, day-in, day-out, was impossible to cover over the course of a week. Making pigmash for your pig club porker is jolly fun for a day – how vastly more important would that club be when you'd lived on rations for a year? I've seen bloggers/Instagrammers try the Ration Book Challenge, where they follow rationing for a month, and really admired their dedication.

Lack of eggs in the 1940s means this dried egg substitute for breakfast.

Because the programmes are all about food, the visual side of things is more to set the mood rather than aimed at accuracy, and I really felt that when it came to the furnishings and outfits in these three episodes. I think a lot of the clothing Rochelle and her daughters wore might have been original – the colours and prints gave me that impression – but far less work went into their hair and makeup than the previous series. (I wonder if they wore their outfits all day off camera?) The 1920s and 1930s houses looked more like a modern idea of what homes looked like in those decades than what homes look like in most of the magazines and books I've got from the time, though I did find myself coveting some of the wallpaper. The 1920s house, in particular, didn't seem to have as much colour as I'd have expected.

I like this 1920s room, but it doesn't feel authentically colourful to me. Seems more 30s.

So weirdly, I didn't find these three episodes nearly as satisfying as I'd expected to. I enjoyed them, but I didn't love them. I think I'd have preferred a fuller immersion in a time, perhaps with a family spending a month or two in a particular decade.

The makers are now looking for families for a follow-up series, Back In Time For Tea, which will focus on food in the north of England. I'm a little baffled by that as the first series followed menus from all over Britain anyhow, not just the south, and 'tea' is a working-class expression for the evening meal, not a purely northern one*. But it will be interesting to see what they come up with; if it's anything like the food Mr Robot remembers his Lancastrian nan serving up, they'll need proper grit and determination to get through it all.

Did you see the programmes? Did you long for a bit more immersion, like I did, or find it a fascinating look at food fashions and trends?



 * It comes from 'high tea', the substantial meal served at around 6pm, so earlier than dinner, at about the time working people usually got in. Working-class people had high tea, posh ones had dinner.