Tray bakes - something old turned into something new

"I am not sure I like the term – 1970s convenience food springs to mind – but I love what it stands for: the idea that, after doing the prep, you can sit down with a cuppa or a glass of wine and relax for an hour or two while your meal more or less cooks itself. And, unlike a stew, which offers the cook a similar break, a bake retains much of the freshness and integrity of its components, particularly vegetables." Yotam Ottolenghi

I'm not sure I like the term either. To me it sounds very folksy American - maybe it's that Rodgers and Hammerstein song about 'a real good clam-bake' from Oklahoma perhaps. I can't quite remember which musical. But like Yotam Ottolenghi I do like the concept. Mind you, like everyone else he seems to think it's something new. But it's not it's ancient. Originally the means of cooking were limited - a spit roast and a stew in a pot suspended over a fire mostly. But once they invented the oven - which is a long, long time ago (and I must look into that sometime), the tray bake became a common thing. People did not have their own ovens. They often put their food to be baked in the local baker's oven, and so it would have been convenient to have whatever it was all on one tray. A tray bake.

My introduction to the modern notion of putting everything on a tray and roasting it in the oven was Delia's wonderful roasted Mediterranean vegetables - or Oven-roasted Ratatouille as she calls it. And she showed you a couple of ways to vary this too - in a salad with couscous and also a winter version with winter vegetables. I think there's a lasagne too and maybe a couple of other things. Once you had mastered this you could invent to your heart's delight.

I'm pretty sure she is not solely responsible for the modern craze for the tray bake but she certainly started me off. I had been looking for a recipe for classic ratatouille, which I love to make, but which takes time and watching a bit. So when I bought her Summer Collection - the first of her books that I bought or was given, and I saw this recipe I was rapt.

Incidentally it's interesting how one finds a particular favourite chef/cook. I found Delia when I was cataloguing videos (remember them?) at the State Film Centre of Victoria and I was given her video series that became the book Delia's Summer Collection, to catalogue. I loved just about everything she did on that program and became a fan. Like millions. In England it's called the Delia effect. If she recommends something it becomes big. And apparently her oven ratatouille recipe has become one of her most loved recipes - as one of her other tray bakes that I have also made a few times - Chicken Basque.

Other names for tray bakes that we have known for centuries are:

(1) roast - as the photo of a roast pork fillet from Donna Hay at the top of the page and also her Sticky Miso and Sesame Roasted Chicken at right. What makes them a tray bake rather than a roast is the addition of the very trendy vine-ripened cherry or cocktail tomatoes to the pork and roast broccolini to the chicken. Which is minimal, but subtly different from roast potatoes which would have been traditionally baked with the roast.

(Now why do they get called cocktail tomatoes? Surely you don't put them in cocktails? Although I know nothing about cocktails, so maybe you do. A Bloody Mary perhaps.)

(2) Gratins and casseroles - one pot sort of stews that are baked in the oven not on top of the stove. this one reminds me of Lancashire Hot Pot and is another Donna Hay dish. She had a section on tray bakes in her last magazine, which is why I am doing this post - that and another section on tray bakes in the latest Coles Magazine. I'm not really sure whether this kind of thing (Lamb, Tomato, Olive and Chilli Potato Bake) really counts as a tray bake, because there is often a bit more preparation involved. Certainly in this one, though I suppose your tradition gratin is simple. It's just layers of whatever you are cooking covered with a liquid of some kind and very likely some cheese. And for a very modern one, try Hearty Cabbage and Potato Gratin with Gruyère and Ricotta from Yotam Ottolenghi.

(3) Lasagne - which is kind of a gratin really. Layered things in a tray that is put in the oven. But like the gratins they involve a bit more preparation. And certainly this Cheat's Cauliflower Cheese Lasagne - from Donna Hay again involves you making a béchamel sauce - in however a simple way. I guess the rest is pretty easy though - and it would make a good dish to serve to vegetarians. But not really what I think of as a tray bake. And Yotam Ottolenghi also has a vegetarian go at lasagne with his Pasta and Butternut Squash Cake.

(4) Then sticking with the Italians, there's Pizza. Well you just put stuff in the oven don't you and it is indeed one of those dishes that date back to the time of cooking in the baker's oven. Coles Magazine, being more proletarian than Donna Hay, has one of these, and they do somehow make it look more like a tray bake than a pizza. And looking at it like this makes me think that good old toad in the hole is a tray bake too.

And here I find that I do in fact have an image in my head of a dish that I would call a tray bake, rather than a fancy, trendy version of something old. A new thing - like the oven ratatouille Perhaps the most common of these, thinking of those sausages in Toad in the Hole is a sausage bake and Coles have featured one - simply called Sausage and Potato Tray Bake.

And really it has almost the same ingredients as the pizza, just simpler. Everything is just chucked in the roasting pan tossed with some oil, herbs and garlic and cooked. They also have a rather more complicated Pulled Beef Nachos, which even though it uses a whole host of premade ingredients is really rather more tricky than the sausages. You have to cook the beef first, then 'pull' it and do a fair bit of chopping of the other ingredients. But I guess the final stage is a tray bake.

(5) Going back to the Italians just briefly - there is frittata - or the Spanish would call it Spanish omelette I guess. Well this is more of a variation because I think frittata is supposed to be cooked entirely on the cooktop. Me - I finish it off in the oven. Anyway in this version of a tray bake you assembly your ingredients, and then pour egg over them, rather than batter or liquid. Trendy Donna Hay has one called Supergreen Frittata.

When I look at this sort of beautiful dish, I wonder about the rather charred looking fronds of cavilo nero. Are they what makes it a tray bake? Because without them it would just be a frittata I think. Which is not really a tray bake.

I think I have probably been a bit boring with this - just a list of dishes I found in two magazines and on the net. But really it is a phenomenon. Hardly an issue of a cooking magazine goes by without some reference to a tray bake - with, it seems to me, the most ubiquitous ingredients being those tomatoes still on the vine, and chorizo, with chicken and sausages as runners up. I guess it's all part of the thing of trying to get people to cook 'real' food that is quick, easy and delicious. And I didn't mention fish. Whole or in bits you can sit it on a bed of something or mix it in with something. And that something can include just about everything you can imagine. In spite of my frisson of snobbery at the term - it seems somehow downmarket to me - I do think it's a really good way of getting people who think they can't cook to try it out. You just have to be sure you only put that cavolo nero in near the end.

Then there are the cakes - that's a whole other world. And really I think it's just cake baked in larger quantities in a bigger tray, so I don't think I shall attempt that. Mind you there is also fruit. Should have done that perhaps. Another time.