The enduring appeal of the Aga

A cooker is not just for cooking. That is the starting point to understanding the Aga.

It is impractical, environmentally unfriendly, and expensive. Everyone – including the Aga’s most ardent devotees – knows that. And yet the Aga cooker next year will celebrate its centenary. Despite all the modern appliances that should long ago have rendered it obsolete, these enamel-coated cast-iron behemoths continue to soldier on indefatigably. They are one of the twenty first century’s great survivors.

The brand has a glorious history. The Aga cooker was invented by a Nobel Prize-winning Swedish physicist. Having been blinded by an explosion from an earlier invention that went awry, he decided to turn his attention to designing something to help his wife in her daily toil. In later years, Douglas Scott, best known for his work on London’s classic Routemaster bus, worked on a tweaked Aga design. But no-one had more of an influence on the brand’s success than a young sales executive who in 1935 wrote ‘The Theory And Practise Of Selling The AGA Cooker‘. The New Standard Aga had just been launched, a British developed variation on the original Swedish product, and the manual was intended to help the company’s salespeople push the brand in the fledgling UK market. The pamphlet’s advice for success in selling door-to-door (‘Dress quietly and shave well. Do not wear a bowler hat’) worked wonders. The smart salesman went on to become the King of Madison Avenue and the ‘Father of Advertising’. Fifty years later Fortune magazine called David Ogilvy’s Aga pamphlet ‘the best sales manual ever written’.

But, in 2021, why would anyone still want one? Aga cookers stay on constantly – 24 hour a day, 7 days a week – and use a corresponding amount of energy (though you can at least choose the fuel that suits you – natural gas, kerosene, diesel or electricity). And in addition to the ruinously high running costs (in return for which your house will become, in the summer months, a sticky sauna), you’ll fork out upwards of £8k, plus installation charge, at the outset. They are notoriously awkward to use. There is no temperature control, just a number of ovens and hotplates with different temperatures for roasting, baking or simmering. And as soon as you lift the lid on an Aga hotplate to boil your potatoes the oven starts cooling down. Don’t attempt a Heston Blumenthal recipe using one of these.

And yet therein also lies the Aga’s appeal. They are a proud rebuke to the precision and science of much modern-day celebrity chef-led cooking. It is a declaration of the sort of cook you are. Unconstrained by prescriptive recipes – for cooking on an Aga makes slavish adherence to instruction quite unachievable. To own an Aga is to bite your thumb at molecular gastronomy.

An Aga has a mind of its own. It is not for nothing that proud owners bestow upon their cooker anthropomorphic characteristics. It is a ‘friend’, a ‘companion’ in the kitchen. And it requires getting to know. Like breaking a wild horse, it is an ordeal but once you have harnessed its energy a bond is formed, an understanding established. To use an Aga you have to be an instinctive and, yes, a sure-footed cook. Once mastered, you can glide around the kitchen confident that you are as much a domestic goddess as the Two Fat Ladies.

Mary Berry, perhaps the Aga’s most famous advocate today, declares that owning one is ‘like joining the best club in the country … when you meet another Aga owner it is like discovering an instant friend’. It is hardly surprising one seeks kinship with fellow Aga owners, desperately comparing notes on recipes written for conventional cookers. That explains too the range of Aga cookbooks and in-house magazine Aga Living. ‘The Aga Community’ social pages online meanwhile read like an addicts’ support group where sufferers can go for a sympathetic hearing when the Yorkshire puds won’t rise.

Even with a bespoke Aga recipe, there is no doubt that this machine lends itself to a certain style of cooking. For one-pot stews, slow-baked pies and other wintry warmers they are ideal. But they are the least multicultural of cooking appliances; not only would making a Chinese stir-fry on an Aga feel incongruous, it would be almost impossible as the hotplates would struggle to get your wok hot enough.

Despite their intransigence, they do have some culinary uses. Roasting a bulb of garlic is the sort of frivolous kitchen indulgence that suddenly becomes possible where you previously might have balked at the idea of leaving the fan-assisted oven on for 10 hours. And of course proper home-made stock is a reality when the pot can bubble quietly away in the simmering oven overnight. Aga enthusiasts, slighted at the frequent sniping they receive, resort to increasingly ingenious ploys to justify their pricey purchase: the tightly-closing ovens simultaneously steam and roast producing perfect jacket potatoes they will earnestly tell you. And that tricky business of melting chocolate using a bain marie is dispensed with if one is enlightened enough to choose an Aga. One simply places the bowl of chocolate on the enamel top between the hot plates and does one’s best to not drip on one’s laundry drying on either side.

But ultimately, you don’t own an Aga because of its cooking credentials. Half of those who have one will take inspiration from Ed ‘Two Kitchens’ Miliband and have a secret Miele through a discreet door in the utility room. To complain that an Aga is a pain to cook with is to miss the point. It is an expression of your identity, your aspirations and life philosophy. Declaring yourself the owner of an Aga is to pin your colours to the Slow Food culinary mast. Everything about it is wholesome and old-fashioned. Right down to the foundry in which they are still made in Shropshire, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution.

Aga have introduced new models in recent years in which all the elements can be switched on and off as needed, and one can even control the beast remotely via smartphone. It may help the brand to win new millennial converts – conscious of the environment but equally attracted to the sturdiness of this machine, like the KitchenAid mixer or the Volvo estate, and above all determined to embrace the bucolic existence that an Aga evokes.

But it is the unsophisticated bluntness of the classic models that inspires loyalty. You don’t want to turn it off. It is the airing cupboard, radiator, oven and stove all in one – not to mention the toaster and kettle. And an oven which is always on is one that you are probably inclined to use more – if only out of guilt. If the Aga causes you to cook more from scratch is that not enough to recommend it? And if it makes the kitchen the warmest room in the house and therefore becomes for the whole family the centre of the home, does that not vindicate this ostensible extravagance? The purchase of an Aga is a hankering for a bygone time. But is that such a bad a thing?