Elderly baking tray, foil, oven, domestic dispute: please advise a silly person...

[solidgoldbrass]

So I left DS dad in charge of cooking fishfingers for DS on his regular Wednesday night visit... come back to smell of burning and crabby DS dad who reckons my oven is broken. Having inspected the results, basically the baking tray (which is admittedly 30 years old) is in a sorry state, and I am vaguely thinking that this is because he covered it with foil which increases the heat, and the smell is from vintage non-stick coating (or TBH years of use) having burned off.
Am I right or unreasonable or is the oven about to turn into the fiery furnace of mythology?

well I used to use foil on the grill pan on the oven in my old house (to avoid cleaning it ) - never had any problems with burning.....but it wasn't a 30yr old baking tray so don't know whether that was a factor or not

I always put foil on all of my baking trays....to avoid scrubbing them Don't get a burny smell though!

Were the under grill? My grill once caught fire after havigng a funny smell about it.

We laugh about it now, but t'was rather scary at the time. The flames almost touche the ceiling at one point

i foil too, so I don't have to scrub.
never had burning

Hmm. I use foil to line my grill pan sometimes, and don't have this problem. Wouldn't the foil reflect heat back into the oven, rather than on to the baking tray?

Is this your first ever posting under this topic, sgb? I'm quite charmed to see you posting here!

I think the foil won't increase the heat of the tray. Once it all (tray, foil, food - eventually) comes to temperature it will all be the same temp as the oven. Can never get hotter than the oven.

Grill slightly different - if there is direct radiant heat then it depends on the absorptivity of the material as well as the heat capacity.

Technically I'm an engineer but my work (before dd) was in mathematical modelling.

solidgoldbrass - I agree with others. The foil should have reflected the heat away from the pan.

As a bloke I can safely say that what really happened here was that he left the fish fingers under the grill for about 60 minutes on maximum heat and then returned to find the foil burned through and the fish fingers burnt to carbon. Quite possibly with an aluminum fire as well that creates a quite incadescent white flame as I recall.

He is just making excuses to avoid owning up to the truth and admitting his guilt.

Question him closely. I am sure you know how. He will crack. I suggest you extract an AGA to replace the cooker (or at least a new dress) as a recompense. He will be powerless to resist.

Well he said the fish fingers were burned after 15 minutes - the baking tray is burned back to silver.
However I made toast under the grill this morning without burning the house down.

(No, Habbibu, think I have bewailed a mouse infestation on here...)

That's very cool.

lol @ betadad

and I'm very pleased to see I'm not the only one who uses foil to avoid scrubbing

Bet he did what my DH does - thing will cook faster if cooked at maximum heat, so I will put the oven on full blast. So everything is burnt but raw inside.

Hmm. THing is, he is an established and experienced fish-finger provider. But he may have had a beer last night...