Diana Henry celebrates the labour-saving, flavour-boosting, heart-warming power of the one-pot dinner

I didn’t start out as a one-pot cook. I used to spend my weekends boning chickens, making pumpkin tortelloni and glazing tarts that would have made a French pâtissier weep. Thirty years ago, cooking – for me – was all about acquiring skills and perfecting dishes. I was teaching myself. Then I had children. Once they arrived, it was impossible to make this kind of food and, more to the point, when you work and have two children, a pile of washing-up can push you over the edge.

I developed a style of cooking, though I never called it ‘one-pot’ then, where I used roasting tins or a broad, shallow casserole and stuck everything in the oven. This idea came from a recipe by the late Antonio Carluccio. He simply put chicken thighs, halved baby potatoes, wedges of onion, rosemary and unpeeled cloves of garlic into a roasting tin and drizzled the whole lot with olive oil. There was no browning, you just had to make sure the food was in a single layer, otherwise it would steam instead of roasting. You bunged it in the magic box in the wall of your kitchen and waited for the transformation. If you use this recipe as a blueprint, you can make hundreds of versions by changing the vegetables and the flavours – and I have. I’ve been a ‘bung it in the oven’ cook since 1998.

As the children grew, I started to cook other ‘one-pot’ dishes that required more hands-on work – browning meat and sautéing vegetables – but that still created only limited washing-up. With true one-pots, the starchy component has to go into the cooking pot too (except for bread). Lots of old-fashioned French sautés, such as chicken bonne femme, can include potatoes and other vegetables – a one-tin creation before the label became cool.

The one-pot repertoire is large, and the dishes require various degrees of effort. Some, such as paella, are famous simply because they’re cooked in one pot, letting the flavours mingle and intensify as each ingredient is added. With this kind of food – where the starch might be basmati or Spanish rice, or pastas such as orzo – you have to know exactly what quantity to use and how much liquid is needed. One-pot and one-tin dishes are quite low effort, but you have to get specifics right and add each element at the right time. I’m often scribbling little notes to myself on the back of envelopes – ‘rice in halfway through’ or ‘add olives 10 mins before end’. You need to use the right size of receptacle for one-pot rice and pasta dishes, too.

Despite the current craze for this type of meal, the concept is ancient. Cooking a meal in a single vessel hung over fire is what you have to do if that fire is your only source of heat. As soon as there were pots, there was one-pot cooking. Carrying your roasting tin filled with a leg of lamb, potatoes, garlic, oregano and wedges of lemon to the oven in the local bakery, or a communal oven, was common in Europe until the 20th century and is still practised by cooks in the Middle East and North Africa. It’s about the efficient use of energy.

There’s something else, though, that has nothing to do with practicalities. A one-pot dish is the hero on any table. We tilt our head towards it when it arrives and feel lifted by warmth, both physical and psychological, and by the fact somebody has made this dish for us. We become joined as eaters and people who are loved. One-pot might be a ‘trend’ but we’ve been cooking like this for centuries, and not just because we can’t face the washing-up.