One of my pet peeves in this obsession people have with preheating ovens. Why do they do it?

Is it because the fire had to be roaring before it was hot enough to cook the pot on? Maybe the Arga needed to be left a while until the coal was burning efficiently?

But these days we don't have so many of these ancient "appliances" (I still love to cook over a real fire on occasions) and the world has changed in terms of how we consume energy - we need to conserve our energy reserves.