how to cook on a low and high oven

In order to know how and what to bake in your oven you need to know what temperatures you get from your low and high settings. There's no standards with ovens that have just a low and high setting, so we can't tell you for sure. The low on an oven may be barely enough to warm something or it could be very hot.

You need to work backwards, measuring what temperatures your oven produces and picking recipes which work in that temperature range. I suggest you buy an oven thermometer and record the temperatures produced by each setting over a couple of hours. Test whether using the burners (if your range has gas burners as well) while the oven is on makes a difference in temperature so you know what to expect if you are using both at the same time.

You might get steady and predictable temperatures, or they may go up and down a lot. If they fluctuate more than 10 degrees then you won't be able to bake anything that requires an exact and constant temperature, but there are still many things you can make. Using covered heavy metal pots like dutch ovens will help smooth out temperature fluctuations.

Here are a few things you can make at different temperature ranges once you know what low and high give you. It's not a full list but should give you an idea:

• Below 50C: You can dry foods, keep them warm, and rise bread but not actually cook anything
• 50 - 120C: there's not that much you can bake at this temperature, although you could do a very slow roast or braise as long as it's above 90C or so. If it's too low, say below 70C it's not hot enough to kill off foodborne illnesses
• 120-160C: this is a good temperature for slow roasting and braising meats, and roasting vegetables. You can also bake some breads and cakes at the high end of this temperature
• 160-200C: there's a lot you can do in this range: breads, cakes, pies, cookies, brownies, baking potatoes, roasting tender meats and poultry, and baking fish. Casseroles are very forgiving and would be fine anywhere in this range, even if it's fluctuating
• 200-230C: this is getting hot, things get crispy quickly at this temperature. Some breads (usually thin rather than loaves) need this temperature, you can bake chicken pieces, meatballs, pizza, and fish. You can crisp up the tops of dishes like crumbles and shepherds pie
• Above 230C: Thin pizzas like a really hot oven, you need to be careful what you bake in a very hot oven as it can burn very quickly. You can crisp up the tops of dishes but keep an eye on them and pull them out before they get charred

I suggest you stick to braised meats, casseroles and other dishes that can tolerate the temperature going up and down until you have some experience with the oven, then expand the types of things you bake once you know what to expect.

There are very few oven baked foods which absolutely require a certain range. The others tolerate a wide range of temperatures, they just take longer or shorter to get done. Remember that ovens with thermostats are a few decades old. For most of human history, all foods have been baked without an oven being set to some temperature.

The way you do it is to choose the setting better suited to your food, stick it in, and wait until it's done. It's simple, and it's how everybody with a degrees-setting-oven does it, only with less settings to choose from. Choosing the "right" setting is not easy (no matter how many you have). You either know what the baking is doing to your food, and so choose high or low where appropriate, or you go with GdD's suggestion: measure the temperature reached at high and at low, then use whatever is closer to the temperature given in a recipe.

The times given in a recipe will of course be moot. This doesn't matter, as they are moot anyway, even if you have a thermostat. Times in recipes are very general guidelines, and very imprecise. You should take the food out when it's done, not when it reaches some set time point.

There are three foods I can think of immediately which are likely to fail if your oven does not have the proper temperature range: - if your "low" is not low enough, large custards (such as a flan) will not work, because the outside will curdle before the middle is set. This can be mitigated by making small flans in a muffin tin, and putting the tin in a water bath. - egg white foam based foods are finicky about temperature. A dry meringue, a macaron or a pavlova won't have the right texture if you can't hit their narrow optimal zone. - if your food is steam leavened. Popovers, pate au choux and similar need a very hot oven. If your "high" setting is not sufficient, they won't rise properly.

Most anything else has a wide range of tolerance. You won't be able to make them perfect, but you will be able to achieve "quite good" with surprisingly little control over the temperature. For example, a real Neapolitan pizza needs a 600 C hot oven. While the pizzas made at 250 C home ovens are obviously different, most home bakers enjoy their homemade pizza a lot. And for many other foods, the difference between what your oven can achieve and what their optimum is will be nowhere as large as a 350 C interval.