Saturday 8 August 2015

AGA SAGA


For all you Bake-Off fans, I thought I would show you this little wayside shrine hidden away on the outskirts of Bath - an AGA in Mary Berry's old house there. Yes, the cookery queen has actually used this oven.

AGAs are like Land-Rovers - idiosyncratic, difficult to use and expensive to maintain. I have never lived with an AGA, but I have used them quite a lot. I have lived with a Rayburn, which was the 'modern' version of a coal or wood-fired Victorian range. Mine was coal-fired and you learned to time everything about 1 hour in advance when cooking. Luckily I had a gas cooker as a back-up.

If you live in town and have aspirations toward AGA ownership, then they make oil and electric versions as well, of course. In the Winter, I like AGAs, but I hate them in the Summer. If you depend on them for cooking and hot water, then they simmer away right through the hottest of days, making the kitchen a little piece of hell on earth, when it should be the family focal-point. (No conflicts of interest there, then).

A few years ago, I bought a new cooker - very cheaply off the net. We run on bottled gas, which means that all of our gas cooking bills amount to no more than three bottles at £33 each, per year. That is very cheap.

A friend came round to our compact but adorable city apartment (haven't said that for a while) for the first time a year or two ago, and was visibly shocked at the primitive facilities of our kitchen. I was supposed to have a separate hob, set into an island wood top, with an independent, multiple-choice, fan-assisted oven below, but what we really have is something designed for for life on a boat.

I wish I could say that it did everything that a £2000 cooker does, but it doesn't. It cost under £200 and I am thinking about selling it to a boat-dweller and spend a few extra 100s on something a little more sophisticated. The trouble is that you are forced to use butane when indoors, and butane is so much less efficient than propane.

I was in a house once which had just been fitted with a brand-new, shiny AGA. The engineer was just making the final touches to the installation. The final touches involve polishing the copper pipework until it looks like the bed-warmers you see hanging from pub walls. AGA insists on it when they dole out the dealerships.

23 comments:

  1. This week's silliest Silly-Season headline on The Star 'newspaper': SEAGULLS POISED TO PECK AT BAKE-OFF'S CAKES.

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  2. Mum mum bought a Rayburn in 1958 for £56 plus a few extras the final cost being £60. We found the handwritten invoice in her kitchen drawer when we cleared up recently. Rayburns are also made by Aga. Mum chose a Rayburn because she considered it was more immediate in heat changes if she stoked it up and she considered it got hotter and she liked heat. It was coke fired and she never ever let it go out and later in 1972 my brother converted it to oil. It is still going strong and still looks like new. It heated our farmhouse beautifully and supplied all the hot water, which sometimes boiled. Aga is of course in the throes of a takeover from an American co. Middle something, the name escapes me at this moment.

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    1. I loved my Rayburn too. £60 was quite a lot in 1958. You could buy a good second-hand car for £20.

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    2. It was the most money my mum ever spent. Our cars came from ex army sales in Ruddington, nr Nottingham for a few pounds, and we went around it ex army Humber staff cars etc.

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  3. We had a 2-bum Aga at my people's house in Shropshire; it ran off little round nuts of coal (Thermacite?). During the coal miner's strike we were forced to buy poor quality Polish stuff that totally buggered the insides of the Aga. I'm still considering sending bastard Scargill the bill.

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    1. 2-bum? Luxury. I am amazed you have deftly managed to get a dig at Scargill into this. Skilful.

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    2. P.S. Scargill can't take all the credit. You can thank Thatcher and that Canadian minister for helping him along. Between the three of them, they buggered it all up nicely.

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    3. Scargill refused to sit round the table and negotiate.

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    4. 2-bum refers to the width. You turn your back to your Aga, cling onto the rail, and see how many it can fit. Yours above is a 3-bum model.

      Scargill was 100% to blame; neither Mrs T or the Canadian stopped the production of coal.

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    5. I hate Scargill as much as you, but you cannot just re-write history to fit with your screamingly right-wing views from the vantage point of your comfortable lives, unless you really believed all that tosh from McGregor and Thatcher. With Scargill, it was a personal battle, and to hell with the welfare of the miners.

      Right now - thanks to Scargill's legacy - they can finish the job which Thatcher began and handed on to Blair. They can dismantle the unions once and for all.

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    6. I think you've just proved my point.

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    7. And I thought I was writing an innocuous, almost 'life-style', post about AGAs. It just goes to show - it really is impossible to keep politics out of anything.

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  4. Very upscale from my aunt's cast iron cooking stove that ran twenty four hours a day, feeding farm hands. It had a side compartment that heated water and an overhead warming tray. These things were so indestructible they are still on the market, refurbished to their original black and shiny chrome glory.

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    1. Every large house in Bath was fitted with a blacked, cast iron range. Some of them are still there.

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  5. My only means of cooking (apart from an electric hob) is my beloved oil-fired Aga, which came new to the farmhouse on the day we did twenty years ago. It was love at first sight and has never wavered. It stays in winter and summer - our kitchen faces North with the only windows to the west. It is a large kitchen and I can honestly say that it has never been too hot. But then the weather up here in the Dales is rarely hot. Once you get used to cooking without a temperature gauge, using the shelf position to guide your estimate of the heat, it is a doddle. Long live the Aga

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    1. Yes, you must have mastered it by now, Weave. I never lived with one long enough.

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  6. It was a balmy 104 degrees yesterday with a heat index of 112. Nothing gets cooked in this heat. My old tom turkey died from the heat yesterday. Aga is only for the elite over here. Very expensive as are all like them.

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    1. Poor old turkey. I thought they were 'cock' turkeys, not 'Toms'? Or are you just calling me a turkey?

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  7. Believe it or not: I always wanted an AGA. Though they told me, when in GB, that I had to learn to use it in a special course. Well - till today it remained my Harley-Davidson dream for my kitchen...

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    1. So, like Harley-Davidons, the desire for AGAs is a symptom of mid-life crisis? That's the trouble with these things. By the time you can afford them, you are too old to be able to use them properly.

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  8. I've never really wanted an AGA ….. my friend had one and her potatoes in their jackets could have been used at the Battle of Trafalgar !!!!!!! Perhaps she never got to grips with it !!! XXXX

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    1. Yes - I think the dangers of AGA misuse are either over-cooking too slowly, or under-cooking too quickly. Timing and oven-position are the keys.

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  9. I saw an Aga over here that called to me, but I didn't have the funds so didn't get it. It's not the kind that needs to be on all the time; I guess they made it more for the American market. If I have one that had to stay on all the time, it's be all right for about nine months of the year here.

    What I really want is a gas stove with two ovens, but not something that's going to take up five horizontal feet of wall space.

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