Guest spot: In praise of the Aga by Chris Nelms
Posted by Fiona Nevile in Kitchen equipment | 31 comments
Chris and Louise live in Wiltshire and are proud possessors of an Aga. We don’t have one, sadly, and are extremely envious. An Aga tends to be the hub of most happy houses that we visit. Our long term plans are to install one. When Chris wrote to me and described making friends with his Aga, I knew that it would be of interest.
Danny, a romantic, has dubbed it a love story.
Guest spot: In praise of the Aga by Chris Nelms
Louise and I were fortunate to inherit a nearly new four-oven oil-burning Aga when we bought this house. We had no experience of Agas and no friends with Agas. I trawled the Aga website for information; it was strong on sales blurb but weak on what it’s actually like to live with one.
In an act of cowardice, we splashed out on a matching Aga Companion electric cooker, expecting to cook with this rather than the scary Aga. After all, Agas have no knobs to control the heat so how could any serious chef cook on such a primitive appliance?
How wrong we were. Within weeks we were converts. The electric cooker has been used only once in seven years. The faithful Aga has won a place in our hearts and we cannot imagine life without it.
Unlike some Aga owners, we leave ours burning throughout the year. In winter, its cosy warmth makes the kitchen the natural centre of our home. The heat spreads surprisingly well through the house and we suspect it earns its keep by saving on heating bills. Just as well because it burns about 8 litres of heating oil a day or ?900 a year. Quite an expense for what is essentially just a cooking appliance.
I found an ex-Aga engineer on the internet selling detailed servicing instructions and do my own annual servicing in 20 minutes, saving ?100.
So what’s it like? Well cooking with an Aga is simplicity itself. The absence of knobs makes life easier, not harder. Louise has progressed from being a fairly good cook into a veritable kitchen goddess. Delicious meals emerge from the Aga every evening without fail. The weekend shift is mine.
It’s just so forgiving. Synchronizing different components of a meal used to be challenging but now, with a warming oven and a simmering oven as well as the main baking and roasting ovens, any food that’s ready too soon can be parked without spoiling until required. Rare steaks can be rested, plates warmed, etc.
A full English breakfast or traditional Christmas dinner with all the trimmings is easy and fun. Cooking for guests is no longer stressful. Aga toast is better than from any toaster, dough proves perfectly on the warming plate, beer and wine ferment nearby, damp clothes dry on the front rail, children’s pyjamas warm before bedtime.
Arriving home after a day out, the Aga is instantly ready for action with no waiting for an oven to heat.
Disadvantages? Very few. In the height of summer we get a few more flies coming into the kitchen, and a prolonged cooking stint leaves one rather hot. The cooking smells go up the chimney rather than into the kitchen so a forgetful cook can easily be unaware that something in the oven is burning.
Otherwise it’s just a matter of environmental conscience: an Aga is an extravagance, burning fossil fuel around the clock. We offset the guilt in this household by heating the remainder of the house with three wood burning stoves.
At the risk of sounding over-dramatic, owning an Aga is a life-changing experience. Anyone who loves food and cooking will never look back. If in doubt buy a few books by Aga cookery experts such as Louise Walker and Mary Berry and read what they say. Get one if you possibly can and, ideally, invest in a four-oven model. You will not regret it.
Rather as a lover of wood fires wouldn’t contemplate life in a house without a chimney, an Aga convert couldn’t imagine a kitchen without an Aga.
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I had a very old coal stove which only needed re-fuelling every 24 hours and had to move.I really miss my stove so if anyone out there has a oal one to sell give me acall on o1872 501576.I live in cornwall and would use it for heating as it is econimical
Hello,
I’m wondering if I can advertise here that I have a vintage (50’s) old two oven coal AGA to sell for a good home. This was my parent’s home cooker.
richard
Hello Amanda
I enjoyed your comment! Keep up the good work.
Oh lord – what an embarrassingly long “comment”! Grovelling apologies … please feel free to chop radically or omit entirely!
After reading this thread with interest I thought I’d add my own Aga saga …
Twenty-seven years ago I acquired a husband and an Aga in one fell swoop
– the former was a farmer and the latter was a solid-fuel-converted-to-oil vintage cream job that was already installed in the farmhouse. Said Aga had been used to great effect for the previous thirty-four years by husband’s mother. Measuring up to mother-in-law was a challenge I was very definitely not equipped for! As an RAF officer who had lived in the Officer’s Mess, I had had nothing at all to do with cooking, let alone on an Aga with hot spots, cool spots and a tendency to go out at the most inappropriate moments!
Married in April, the first few months were spent with permanently bruised toes as a result of kicking the Aga in frustration. In August I made three attempts at baking a birthday cake for husband – all of which ended up either in the bins or the dogs. Husband joked that our bins had ulcers and that the dogs started salivating the moment they saw me walk towards the Aga. This became tedious with repetition and I was in danger of losing my sense of humour permanently. But the coup de grace came when the Aga, with an exaggerated sense of the dramatic, decided to turn its toes up on the evening of Christmas Eve. I sat on the floor of the kitchen and cried, surrounded by oily, black smuts which the Aga had belched out onto every available surface. The next day our 26lb turkey, transported to and fro in the back of the farm van, had to be cooked half a mile away in my parents-in-law’s new electric oven. The rest of our first married Christmas dinner (to which we had invited my parents, grandmother, two sisters and brother) was cooked on a table-top Baby Belling oven – standing on a stool to see into saucepans on the two rings. The meal was a culinary relay … cries of “The sprouts and chestnuts are ready!” were followed some time later by “The carrots are ready now!”
and, eventually, “I think the sausages are done at last!”.
I did NOT like my Aga and was firmly of the opinion that Aga fans should be corralled together and kept safely away from the sane majority – preferably in a remotely located home for the terminally unbalanced.
Fifteen years later we sold the farmhouse and built a new one further up the lane (with central heating, double-glazing and an en-suite bedroom … I thought I’d died and gone to heaven!). Our architect asked if I really wanted the Aga I had designed into the kitchen. For twenty-four hours I tried to convince myself that I didn’t. After all, electric was clean, reliable, adjustable! BUT … our Aga had warmed the kitchen, revived pet hamsters, dried and “ironed” clothing (folded carefully and stacked on top of the “cool” lid), comforted orphaned lambs, dried saucepans and other metal kitchenware and provided a perch for visitors (who ALWAYS migrate to Agas). It had also cooked two or three hot meals a day (farmers are always so damned hungry!) and fourteen perfect turkeys – though the lead up to Christmas was always spent with crossed fingers. I couldn’t do without it. Unwittingly, and somewhat reluctantly, I had become one of the unbalanced minority!
A reconditioned Aga was tracked down in Cornwall, re-enamelled, transported to Devon and installed. For the first couple of weeks I admired my lovely, shiny, navy blue Aga. I smirked in an unashamedly self-satisfied way whilst showing it off to every visitor. I acquainted myself with its personality, for every Aga is an individual. Then autumn arrived, along with its westerly winds, and flames and/or oily smuts bursting from the firebox became the intermittent norm. The hunt for The Perfect Chimney Pot began. We tried an H pot, a louvre pot, a Marcone flanged pot, a terracotta cowl and a wind-driven aluminium cowl. The ladder against the chimney became a permanent fixture but nothing worked. My mother donated an ancient electric oven to use during the frequent “dead Aga” events. In desperation, we installed an electric extractor fan in the chimney and, at long last, the hunt was over – a true “eureka!”
moment.
We stopped farming some years ago but the Aga, with all its foibles, is still the heart of the house.
P.S. Coming back down to earth – I’ve just had the latest oil bill *gulp*. Is anyone willing to donate to Amanda’s Aga Oil Fund?!!
Hi Midlandcookers
Thanks for dropping by. You sound like a useful resource.
hi just to let all the aga fanatics out there we are a family run business specialising in the renovation of aga cookers we supply most spare parts for aga cookers and are in the process of supplying a 13 amp conversion kit for all types of aga cookers.please feel free to give us a call 07813339907
Hi Dennis
Delighted that you made progress with your Aga and that it was up and running for last winter.
Thanks for your tips and the information regarding buying an old Aga in Sweden.
I would love to own an Aga!
I have installed the AGA, and used antracite to heat it last winter, it took me a while to assembly it, I used vermaculite as isolation instead of the original powder isolation, eventhough itsays on the aga sites the parts are different in new aga´s compared to the old ones, the parts look very much the same from the original design.We love it, to get into a warm kitchen in the mornings at winter time,
if you are looking for old AGA´s solid fuel, you find many on the swedish site http://www.blocket.se/ it is in swedish but just type aga on the search.
Hi Sonja
I do hope that someone can help you find one in Zimbabwe!
Hi Pamela
That’s a lovely memory.
I’d love an Aga one day too.