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My shiny new oven (which has a light in it and everything, and a door you can see through) comes with a manual. Nineteen pages, with pictures and diagrams. I’m pretty sure that nobody ever reads these things, so I thought I’d take a look and see what pearls of wisdom are contained inside.

First up comes the safety page. Always good advice, this one: “Keep children away”. This is generally useful information for most areas of life, and I don’t know why they don’t print it on more things. Then comes “Take all of the styrofoam packing-stuff out of the oven before use”. Somebody, somewhere, has decided that people need to be told this, and that they’re not going to work it out for themselves. Presumably, they’ve also decided that those people who need to be told this are subsequently qualified to use an oven all on their own without any adult supervision.

Just in case there was any doubt, the next one is “Caution: during use, surfaces get hot”. I’m glad to hear it. That’s pretty much the reason I bought the oven in the first place. If they didn’t get hot, it would be a shitty oven. This is a safety warning? It should be on the advertising.

I don’t think anybody pays attention to these things. Most of the information has the distinct air of something that somebody felt it was necessary to say, despite the fact that no one was ever going to notice. “Close supervision while cooking is essential at all times”: no, it isn’t. It’s an oven. You put it on, put stuff in it, then go and watch TV, or read things on the Internet and help stimulate the economy. “Never use when judgement or co-ordination is impaired by the use of alcohol and/or drugs”: but those times are when I’m at my most hungry!

Then we get to the slightly interesting, unexpected ones. “When using a grill, the oven door must be closed”. Then it goes so far as to say the same thing in bold. “Grill door must be closed during grilling”. Apparently it can cause heat damage if you leave the door open. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of it, and I’ve certainly never seen any heat damage on any oven I’ve ever used, but apparently I’ve been doing it wrong all this time. I grill the top of my omelettes (yes it’s cheating, but it works), and to do that you need to leave the pan handle sticking out, so it’s impossible anyway. On a subsequent page the Mysterious Dictator of Oven Usage (MDoOU) mellows slightly, and allows that you should close the door “on completion of grilling”, which is much more reasonable—but then they go and ruin it in the following paragraph, with another insistence that “the door must be closed during cooking”. Since they don’t seem to be able to make up their mind, I’m going to choose to do it my way, instead.

Somewhere in there the MDoOU manages to fit in some actually useful information about how to use grills on different settings, and for different thicknesses of food: you start off at a high temperature, and for thicker stuff, you turn the grill down once it’s seared on the outside, so that it cooks through. It’s odd that this had never occurred to me, since that’s what I do when I’m frying. I suppose it didn’t help that every other grill I’ve ever used had two settings, “on” and “off”. So far that’s the most practical part of this entire nineteen-page document.

And then finally, hidden on page thirteen in the section on fan-assisted cooking (which isn’t relevant for the model I’ve got): “…preheating the oven is often unnecessary. However food such as bread, scones, Yorkshire pudding, do benefit from being placed in a pre-heated oven”.

I wish I’d known that a few weeks ago, before we performed extensive testing on that very subject.

So, does anybody read these things? Has anybody ever found them helpful? Or does everyone just guess?

Also I’d like to offer my services as copy-editor to the white-goods industry. It seems that somebody needs to do it.