Weekdays, I’m very much a ‘bung it in the oven’ cook
FOOD WRITER DIANA HENRY TELLS ELLA WALKER ABOUT THE ‘SEDUCTIVE’ DISHES IN HER NEW BOOK
ONE of the greatest things about the change in seasons – that bright heat of summer shifting into the golden warmth of autumn – is the fact you can use your oven again without feeling bad about it. But what to put in it?
For this, food columnist and cookbook author Diana Henry, 55, has concocted her latest recipe collection, From The Oven To The Table.
It is part of a culinary lineage of Diana’s, which started when she had children. The former TV producer says she “found it impossible to stand and brown meat for casseroles or stir risottos”, and needed new methods for making dinner.
“My first child cried constantly, so I had to find a way of cooking with one hand while I carried him round on my hip,” she remembers. “That meant bunging things in the oven.”
She began amassing recipes focused purely on ingredients that could be roasted or baked, eventually slipping them helpfully into her cookbooks (Cook Simple, and later just Simple) – and now she’s dedicated an entire tome to them.
“I pretty much cook like this from Monday to Thursday,” says the Northern Ireland-born cook. “I do more demanding dishes at the weekend when I have more time, but the rest of the week, I am very much a ‘bung it in the oven’ cook.”
Between the ease and minimal washing up (the joy!), Diana says there is “something particularly seductive about oven dishes”.
As she points out: “The cook doesn’t have to do much, except shop well and have a few ideas for dishes. The food usually looks pretty unpromising when you put it in the oven, but then you pull out a golden, burnished dish 45 minutes later.”
It’s magic. Delicious, straightforward magic. It makes you look good too – because if your friends aren’t impressed by a huge dish of something lustrous and roasted, plonked on the table in front of them, get new friends.
Your oven might be a gnarled, molten-cheese encrusted contraption but, Diana argues, it has quite extraordinary, transformative properties.
“It isn’t just a simple technique, or a lazy one,” she says of roasting. “I love what it does to food – it scorches the edges of pumpkin wedges and intensifies their flavour; it makes the skin of chicken golden and crispy. And you don’t have to do anything while that happens.”
She notes it also improves ingredients too, like “insipid tomatoes, woolly apricots – simply by driving off moisture and finding the sweetness that’s in there”.
Perhaps even more than the food, Diana is a true defender of the table on which it sits.
“If we can’t cook easy dishes, we use that table less often,” she muses. “I know that if my kids and I – because of after-school sports, or because I am away for work – don’t eat together, something goes a bit awry.
“The table is where we chat and exchange news and views. It’s where we actually look at each other. You need dishes that are easy if you are going to eat around the table as often as possible.”
When she’s not cooking, or writing, Diana is often travelling, picking up ideas and immersing herself in cookbooks.
“I very strongly feel that a cookbook has to be much more than just a collection of recipes,” she adds. “Too many cookbooks don’t have an approach, or a ‘take’, or a strong voice.”
It’s not something she need worry about with this one.
■ From The Oven To The Table: Simple Dishes That Look After Themselves by Diana Henry, photography by Laura Edwards, is published by Mitchell Beazley, priced £25 (octopusbooks.co.uk).