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Good Cooking for a Quarter of a Century - and more. (Part One)With the coming of Christmas our thoughts turn once again to festive cooking with all its delights and its pitfalls. As busy but lazy people with a keen interest in high quality food properly cooked and served, we feel that we solved most of the problems of both special and everyday cooking with the installation of our first AGA cooker in January 1962. During the thirty four years since that time we have encountered nothing to change our view that for ease of use and overall excellence of cooking the AGA is virtually without rival.
Micro-wave cookers, conventional electric cookers (with and without fan assisted ovens and with various types of hot-plate), gas cookers (fuelled by town i.e. coal gas, natural gas and bottled gas), and various solid fuel cookers: we have used all these types for everyday normal cooking including baking our bread, (all home made since 1962). They have all done the job adequately and for certain applications are quite excellent: the micro-wave is outstanding for blanching our home grown vegetables prior to freezing (well over 70 Kg a year), and it certainly cooks them beautifully; but for serious bread baking it is really rather poor.
We could continue in this vein about the other cookers we have used. For example, the Jotul 602, a small Norwegian wood burning stove, the only heater in a caravan in which we passed the severe winter of 1978/79 so very comfortably. It was equipped with a ground cast iron hot-plate on which we cooked some quite outstanding "all in one pot" family meals, whilst the wood embers in the body of the stove were superb for grilling meat, for making toast. and for jacket roasting potatoes.
None of these stoves however, was able to do so much as the AGA so easily and with so little fuss and bother. To understand the reason for this one should really inspect an AGA in its component stage and note the massive chrome iron and cast iron castings. These act as accumulators in which the heat from the fuel used, gas, oil, solid fuel, or electricity is stored, ready for instant use. T he rate of consumption of fuel is controlled by a thermostat so that the massive castings absorb the correct amount of heat, and this heat is retained by the very efficient insulating material with which the cooker is packed. The two large hot-plates, 30 cm diameter, are also extremely well insulated by substantial but easily lifted lids.
Thus we have in the AGA a true "heat storage cooker" which is always ready for use at any time, at once, and without any switching on or turning of knobs or levers. Some idea of the substance of the AGA can be gleaned by comparing its assembled weight of approximately 500 Kg with those of other "range type" cookers none of which to our knowledge exceed half that figure i.e. 250 Kg. As far as we know it is the only real heat storage cooker available in the UK today, possibly in the world, and we would be interested to hear from our readers if there are any others At one time there was a rival in the UK manufactured by Smith and Wellstood and marketed under the name of "ESSE": we had no personal experience of it but do recollect its being well regarded.
Just why heat storage cookers are so well liked by people who like (love?) their food only becomes apparent with use. We would say it is due to first class results time after time with little attention and very few failures. There are though, so many uses, dodges and short cuts with an AGA that we feel they are best kept for the second part of this article, which will appear in our Spring Edition.
At one time the insulant used was "kieselgurh" (an unconsolidated form of diatomite or shells of microscopic algae) but it has been superseded by a substance called "granulated vermiculite" (heat expanded mica). As vermiculite is considerably lighter than kieselgurh this has resulted in today's AGA CB approximate weight specification of 482 Kg compared with that of the comparable model of the 1960's (such as we are using) of 572 Kg. Overall performance is much the same ,but we think that the kieselgurh insulation results in slightly lower fuel consumption.
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