In the early 90s a friend bought a five or six chamber Aga. He had lived in a house in Europe that had had one and he loved it. It cost a fortune to acquire and to install as the house had to be structurally reinforced to accommodate the weight of the oven. I remember that it took at least a couple of days to come up to a stable temperature across the whole oven. Each of the cooking chambers had a different temperature.
a subgenre of the family saga genre of literature ... typically interpreted to refer to "a tale of illicit rumpy-pumpy in the countryside" ... it offers a "gingham-checked world" associated with "thatched English villages" and "ladies in floral dresses".
with predictable results w.r.t. quality-of-living when your house already has central heating.
Agas used to be a very rural middle-class thing: it was how I imagine most countryside homes' heating and cooking worked, and it scaled from a modestly-sized cosy cottage to being in expansive stately homes. But postwar, and especially since the 1960s, Agas are just a status-symbol appliance to me.
Like, in North America, you know you've made it when you have a Wolf range and a Subzero fridge in your kitchen. In the UK, it's when you've got an Aga.
...probably because the only comfortable way to run the thing is by also having central air-conditioning installed and running full-blast while you use the thing.
Semi-related, but they aren’t the status symbol they used to be. I know a guy who did quite well out of removing Agas for a few years because they are so expensive to run. Apparently up to 20x the cost of more sensible equipment. They were sold for scrap metal value because people weren’t buying them any more. He charged them to remove it and got paid scrap value.
The worst one I heard was someone who paid £10k for their top end Aga, found it was costing £700 a month to run and it was scrap in under a year.
And the inventor was blind! From the same article:
Dalén lost his sight in an explosion while developing his earlier invention, a porous substrate for storing gases, Agamassan. Forced to stay at home, Dalén discovered that his wife was exhausted by cooking. Although blind, he set out to develop a new stove that was capable of a range of culinary techniques and easy to use.
I would love to know how the blind guy who invented it did his day to day work of tinkering. The Wikipedia entry just says he made it but it seems like a big deal to do that when he did.
Wistar|6 months ago
I thought the whole thing was ridiculous.
defrost|6 months ago
nojs|6 months ago
Funny, the doc says 2-3 hours.
mhh__|6 months ago
DaiPlusPlus|6 months ago
with predictable results w.r.t. quality-of-living when your house already has central heating.
Agas used to be a very rural middle-class thing: it was how I imagine most countryside homes' heating and cooking worked, and it scaled from a modestly-sized cosy cottage to being in expansive stately homes. But postwar, and especially since the 1960s, Agas are just a status-symbol appliance to me.
Like, in North America, you know you've made it when you have a Wolf range and a Subzero fridge in your kitchen. In the UK, it's when you've got an Aga.
...probably because the only comfortable way to run the thing is by also having central air-conditioning installed and running full-blast while you use the thing.
crinkly|6 months ago
The worst one I heard was someone who paid £10k for their top end Aga, found it was costing £700 a month to run and it was scrap in under a year.
Dead technology.
elygre|6 months ago
Dalén lost his sight in an explosion while developing his earlier invention, a porous substrate for storing gases, Agamassan. Forced to stay at home, Dalén discovered that his wife was exhausted by cooking. Although blind, he set out to develop a new stove that was capable of a range of culinary techniques and easy to use.
stevenwoo|6 months ago