The problem of time is an unsolved issue of canonical General Relativity. A possible solution is the Brown-Kuchař mechanism which couples matter to the gravitational field and recovers a physical, i.e. non vanishing, observable Hamiltonian functional by manipulating the set of constraints. Two cases are analyzed. A generalized scalar fluid model provides an evolutionary picture, but only in a singular case. The Schutz' model provides an interesting singularity free result: the entropy per baryon enters the definition of the physical Hamiltonian. Moreover in the co-moving frame one is able to identify the time variable τ with the logarithm of entropy.