The cooker of your dreams - or a waste of space? As a food expert savages Agas, the heated debate begins . . .

YESTERDAY, in a lively radio debate, food writer Matthew Fort blasted the Aga cooker on the grounds that it wasn’t actually that great at cooking. For some listeners, his tirade was nothing short of heresy. Here, Matthew defends his comments, while eight

MATTHEW FORT,

58, lives in

Gloscestershire and

is a food and drink

editor. He says:

ASK a random selection of Aga owners

why they love their range cookers and their replies will invariably be along the following lines:

‘ It’s great for drying things on’ — ‘It’s marvellous for resting your bum against’ — ‘I like the way it keeps the kitchen warm’ — ‘The retrievers love lying against it’ — ‘ The cat adores sleeping on top of it.’

So the Aga isn’t actually for cooking food on, you ask gently?

The proud Aga owner looks surprised. ‘Of course it is,’ they reply. ‘It’s wonderful for stews and breads.’

Anything else?

‘Well, baking generally.’

I see, you say.

‘ And roasting, too,’ they add.

And it does these things better than a more modern cooker, gas or electric, you ask? Does it? Does it really?

Once upon a time, the Aga was cuttingedge culinary technology. That was back in 1922, when Dr Gustaf Dalen, winner of the Nobel Prize for his work on automatic marine-warning lights, designed the Mark 1 version of the Svenska Aktiebolaget Gasackumulator (or Aga, to you and me).

After being blinded by an accident while carrying out an experiment, Gustaf spent a lot of time at home convalescing. Discovering how much time Mrs Dalen was forced to spend hovering over the old- fashioned kitchen range, Gustaf decided that he could come up with something a lot better.

He adapted the principles of heat storage to achieve what the Aga promotional literature used to refer to as ‘a high accumulation of heat in a wellinsulated environment, delivered in precisely controlled quantities’.

Let’s take a closer look at this technological marvel and its precisely controlled quantities of heat, shall we?

So there are thermometers to tell you exactly how hot the ovens are? Er, no. Fingertip control of heat? No, but you can move the saucepans about on top to try to find a hotter or cooler spot. Surely there has to be a grill? Well, no, there isn’t one of those either.

But it does have a boiling plate and simmering plate, a roasting oven, a simmering oven, a baking oven and a warming oven. It has purposedesigned cookware and accoutrements. It is, in short, a whole cooking system.

Nay, more. It is a life- support, lifestyle system designed for people who don’t really like cooking, who like playing at cooking, for whom the image of cooking is more important than the reality.

Let us say that you want to cook a traditional Sunday lunch for a group of eight: roast meat, roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, carrots, greens, gravy and a nice treacle tart. That’s not unreasonable, is it?

Well, you can forget about the Yorkshire pudding and the treacle tart for a start.

You see, when you start opening and shutting those boiling and simmering plates (to cook the veg and make the gravy), you immediately start reducing the heat in the ovens (which is being reduced anyway because you are cooking the meat in one of them and continually opening the others as you try to keep things warm or cook them).

If you’re lucky, you will just about get the fat hot enough to roast the potatoes, but you’ll have to make the treacle tart the day before and nothing will prevent the Yorkshire puddings from being as flabby as an old man’s dewlap. My mother was unable to make a decent Yorkshire pudding in the 30 years she cooked on an Aga.

Of course, you could sacrifice the roast potatoes, but that isn’t a serious option in our house.

I grew up with an Aga. You don’t learn to cook on an Aga, you learn survival techniques: how to get by; how to rescue disaster; how to take pleasure in small triumphs.

We had central heating, too, so the argument about the Aga being the warm, beating heart of the kitchen never really washed. In summer, the kitchen would become a living hell. You can’t turn the bloody thing off, you see, not if you want to cook anything.

So what precisely is an Aga? An icon, a status symbol, a domestic statement, and a companion to the golden retriever, the faded jeans with the crease down the legs and the Ralph Lauren something- or- other, the four-wheel drive, the 2.4 children called Jack and Daisy and Ch-, and the holiday home in Tuscany. An Aga is anything but a machine to cook on.

Think of it like the ancient family retriever: much loved, but dozy and smelly and with dodgy back legs. It’s time to have it put down.

JAMES NAUGHTIE,

53, is the presenter of

Radio 4’s The Today

Programme. He lives

in Richmond, Surrey,

and is married with

three children.

He says: WE HAVE an Aga that was in our house when we moved in. I like it because I find it calming, I like all the little bits and bobs that go with it, I like how it holds its heat. You don’t have to think about it, it’s just there: a warm friend in the corner, solid, dependable. There is a wonderful permanence to them.

I grew up in rural north- east Scotland. We lived in a small farming community where everyone had a kitchen range; it was how people cooked and heated their homes. The smell of clothes or sheets drying on the Aga always reminds me of my childhood. Men like Agas because they help convince us that we are better cooks than we really are. They make food taste better and are perfect for the simplicity of slow cooking that so many men favour. I am sure Gordon Ramsay hates Agas, which in itself is a very good reason to like them.

When I get up at 3am to go and do The Today programme, the Aga is there, quietly holding its heat, cat and dog lying next to it — so soothing on a cold winter’s morning. An Aga is the touchstone of the kitchen, it gives it personality.

JILLY COOPER, 68, is

a journalist and

author. She lives in

Gloucestershire with

her husband and lots

of cats and dogs.

She says:

WE HAVE an Aga and I love it to death. They are expensive but worth every penny. It can make toast, it has two pans and lots of