In my last post, my cottage tour, you may have caught a glimpse of my oven. Yes, it’s an Aga.
I live in the countryside. That is, I live in the worst combination of the countryside, in what the Bortle Scale (the measure of the night sky’s brightness) calls rural/suburban transition. So we don’t have any trains or any buses after 5pm, it’s a 30-40 mile round trip to buy a new pair of shoes and no one wants to drive all this way out to see me. But on the other hand, I live in a brick box less than thirty years old with a square of grass out the back. I don’t live in a thatched cottage with a black labrador, a wardrobe full of inherited tweed and an oven that fulfills all heating functions the house could ever want.
My understanding of an Aga is that it’s a massive enamelled steel thing that’s the centrepiece of the kitchen because of its vast size and price. It takes at least a day to heat up and several days to cool down, it heats the house in winter and has to be turned off in summer, at which point the occupants either live off salad or takeaways until it gets cold again. My Aga is not one of these. Mine is an electric City 60, which is a new model designed for the sort of people who still want to throw £6,160 at a status symbol oven but don’t have the enormous country kitchen to put it in. It’s the width of a normal oven or kitchen cabinet and you switch it on or off as you please.
However, the ovens take an hour to heat up and the hotplate on top takes nine to twelve minutes, depending on which setting you use. That’s the worst of all combinations, right? My electric oven takes five or ten minutes to heat up and my gas hob is on instantly. Sure, I haven’t had to switch it all on yesterday but I also haven’t had to decide to be hungry an hour in advance. Ok, maybe you have a timetable for meals. Breakfast is at 8am, lunch is 12.30, dinner is at 6pm on the dot, that sort of thing. I don’t do that. I eat when I’m hungry. Having to switch the oven on an hour before I can even start the cooking is… it doesn’t work for me.
On Sunday, I decided to cook some part-baked rolls. They take about ten minutes at home. I stick the oven on at 180° for everything, wait ten minutes for the blue light to go off, indicating that the oven has reached its temperature and stick the rolls in. Twenty-five minutes after I decide I’m hungry, there are rolls on the table ready to stuff with far too much cheese.
Today? Ten minutes just to consult the instructions in my welcome book. Which of the two ovens do I use? How do I switch it on? What do all the symbols around the dial mean? I eventually concluded I wanted the top oven, which is the hotter of the two. It can go in baking mode or roasting mode. Well, it’s bread rolls. Baking, of course. Find the setting that allows me to switch that on without also switching on the bottom oven.
Then there’s no light or noise. Nothing to hint that I’ve been successful. This wall switch next to the Aga, is that the mains power? The book doesn’t mention touching it. Is the oven even on? How long before I should be detecting the first warmth, just to tell me whether I’ve actually switched the thing on at all? Oh, for a simple boring peasant-style oven with lights and noises! You know where you are with one of those.
An Aga is an eerily silent beastie, I’ll give it that. I guess if you’re going to have it on for months on end, it needs to be if you’re ever going to sleep in winter. I had to settle down for a while with a book, watching the big purple monster out of the corner of my eye before finally detecting warmth. Then I had to settle down with a book all over again to wait for it to reach a suitable heat.
My next complaint isn’t really the Aga’s fault. My first impression of the cottage’s drawers and cupboards was that I had the equipment to cook anything. It’s all here, just apply imagination and Aga. But… what do I cook the rolls on? There’s no ordinary boring baking tray. One wouldn’t fit, anyway. The oven itself is pretty tiny because all the space is needed for Being An Aga. I don’t know, huge amounts of whatever’s packed in there to make sure it can stay hot and heat the house without burning it down. My mum’s Christmas turkey wasn’t fitting in there.
I found a sort of metal tray and popped my rolls in. At last, I was actually cooking! Now I just had to wait eight to twelve minutes before I could eat them. Better grate the cheese!
Oh no, it’s never that easy. It seems the baking oven is only about 150° so it seemed to take forever, the top didn’t crisp and there were patches on the sides that felt distinctly undercooked. Taken as a whole, an hour and a half later, they were edible but I’m not a convert.
I wasn’t done yet! On Monday I made pasta. That was easier. The hot plate on top only took twelve minutes to heat up. An eternity compared to a gas burner, but still. I lifted the heavy cover and switched the hot plate to boiling mode, then I filled a pan with water and put it on top. No harm in putting it on low heat and letting it warm up.
I was surprised how quickly bubbles started to form on the bottom of the pan. It surely wasn’t starting to boil in under two minutes? I mean, the Aga is a bewildering alien but surely not? Without a thermometer there was no way to check. “Surely not” isn’t enough for me to stick my hand in a potential pot of boiling water. But it didn’t take too long to feel like it really was starting to boil. Getting it high enough to add the pasta took a bit longer and then the fun began.
You can’t adjust the temperature. When you think the water’s getting a bit quiet, you can’t just turn it up. When it boils over, you can’t just turn it down. I pulled the pan to the edge so only two-thirds were actually on the really hot plate – the surrounding also gets warm so you can surround your hot plate with stuff to simmer gently but it was cooler enough to stop my pan bubbling over. Only then it was too cool. I had to push it back over. Forget lids. I tried a lid. I already couldn’t control the heat and now the lid was making it boil over in seconds. No, if your hot plate is too hot, a lid makes it far worse. Until that pasta was finally done – overdone, actually, even for someone who likes it quite soft – I had to hover and constantly move the pan from hot zone to cool zone.
And that well-stocked kitchen? No wooden spoon! Now I’m home, it occurs to me that there were tools in a vase on the windowsill. Maybe there was a wooden spoon in there? But there wasn’t in the drawers! I searched three times, increasingly incredulously. Neither was there a good colander. There was a sieve but that was far too small. What is taken to be a pasta pot seemed to be a set of stacking aluminium steamer baskets. That would do.
No, it wouldn’t!
The most colander-like basket had neither handles nor feet. If I held it, I poured boiling pasta water straight over my hands. If I put it in the sink, it sat directly on the bottom and that didn’t seem right either. Was there anything I could sit it on? Yes, it nested nicely in what I’d taken to be the outer pasta pot, which had holes in the bottom. At least my pasta stayed raised while I tipped its water through the two.
On Tuesday I decided to leave the Aga alone and just have toast. There were instructions in my book about using the grid thing to sandwich bread under the hot plate’s lid to make iconic Aga toast; crunchy (burnt) on the outside and soft (untoasted) in the middle but I ignored them. A toaster had been supplied. It’s not the greatest but a modern appliance built to do one thing excellently! Oh, I could have cried.