Stove Lust

Cooking is one of the most delightful, most fulfilling activities on Earth.

Also, it's a total pain in the ass.

Making food taste really, really good requires an awful lot of face time. You must plan your menu very thoughtfully. You must shop for the freshest and best ingredients, sometimes at multiple stores. You must babysit your food constantly as it simmers on the stove or in the oven. You must constantly taste the food, poke it, take its temperature, worry about it, and ignore the recipe when your common sense tells you to.

Or you can just throw £18,310.50 at the problem.

This is an Aga stove.

When I first saw this beauty in the Aga store window on Drumsheugh Place, my jaw hit the sidewalk. I became a slobbering idiot.

Because I knew deep down, in my heart of hearts, that this stove would cook better stuff. I could abandon all this experience-building I have been doing for years, and just turn it over to the Aga. Aga would make me a master cook.

How do I know this? Just look at it! It looks great! It looks ancient! Food tasted better back in the old days! Food was softer, crispier, deeper, creamier, more luxurious.

I mean c'mon. Just look at it!

Itchy Brain

There might be some obstacles.

The price is a bit ... uh, hefty. And then you have to figure out how to schlepp that 484 kilogram (=1,069 pounds, or 1/2 ton) oven across the ocean, then up to your 4th story flat with no lift. And by that I mean ... your 5th story apartment with no elevator because everything in the US is an off-by-one error.

The fact that this will never happen IRL * ...

... just makes me want an Aga stove all the more. Back in the 1970's when I was a kid ...

Back in the 1970's when I was a kid, I spent hours combing through the JCPenney Christmas Catalog. The Christmas Catalog had more toys and electronics than the bi-annual big catalog, which had more clothes and housewares (borrrr-ing). I pored over its pages, thinking what fun I would have if I got this thing or that thing. I would have an infinite amount of things to do.

My biggest problem was boredom, which I now affectionately call itchy brain. It is still a problem, but growing up has taught me three things:

• None of the things in the JCPenney Christmas Catalog would permanently scratch my itchy brain. At best they might keep me occupied for a few weeks.
• I couldn't afford all this crap anyway
• Reading the JCPenney Christmas Catalog was itself the cure for itchy brain ... at least for a little bit

Nowadays I have modern antecedents to the JCPenney Christmas Catalog. I read cookbooks that I will never cook anything out of. I browse Amazon and discog.com. I go into physical libraries and pull books off the shelf, only to replace them a minute later. I window shop for things and philosophies. I am comfortable not doing everything, not reading everything, not listening to, not getting everything I want.

Then came the Aga.

Technology and Not Technology

I really need an Aga stove. If I don't get it, I will always feel like an also-ran in the cooking department. I will waste thousands of valuable hours cooking things the hard way and never getting top-flight results.

One must cook with love. Can I really say I love my family if I refuse to spend a mere £18,310.50 on a stove?

By the way, you gotta admire the chutzpath of Aga for charging that extra 50 pence. Why is that even there? I can imagine me shovelling bills onto the counter, "18,300 ... 18,305 ... 18,310 ... and 50 ... oh crap ... Amy do you have 50 pence? ... I shouldn't have bought those shortbreads yesterday."

Aga stoves are legendary in the UK, having been around since 1929. The core idea is to just lean on cast iron for everything. You like your cast iron pan? Me too. So why not just build a whole friggin' stove with it?

The benefits are multitudinous. In the blog post https://auld-riecke.ghost.io/daylight/ I talk about the modern stove's inner mechanisms, which are really pretty primitive. The temperature continually fluctuates as your oven's heating mechanism can only turn off and off. The air in the oven transfers heat to the food, but it's pretty temperamental.

Cast iron, on the other hand, retains heat better and fluctuates much more slowly. In an Aga oven you heat up the cast iron, which transfers its heat to the food evenly.

TL;DR. You know pizza stones right? With an Aga, your whole oven is a pizza stone.

There are no controls on the Aga oven. This huge-ass heat source spreads heat to every cast iron surface – meaning the floor of the oven, but also the walls and the ceiling too. You can plop a pizza directly on the oven floor. Or you can use racks to keep the food centered - you vary the rack placement to adjust the heat. And there are three ovens, one for roasting, one for baking, and one for keeping things warm. So you don't cook by temperature as much as you cook by location.

Hmmm, but then when is your food done? Well if it's meat, you cook it to temperature. If it's bread or cake, you poke it with a skewer. But unlike a regular oven, you can leave that door open and not worry about it. After all, the heat comes from cast iron, and it doesn't cool down very quickly.

Ooops, I think you just got a Facebook notification. Leave the door open while you go check Facebook. G'head!

This makes all of your food yummier.

How do I know this? Because Mary Berry wrote the Complete Aga Cookbook, muh friend. Mary friggin' Berry!!! You know from the Great British Baking Show? She has the guts to tell you your cherry bakewell sucks ... and she wouldn't hesitate to call out Aga if it sucked. Which it doesn't.

You might wonder about those big waffle-ironish disks on the top of the Aga. They pretty much are waffle irons. That's your heat source. Underneath is a cast iron plate that functions as your burner. To heat your burner, your turn on the aluminum top disk and letting it sit on the cast iron for about 10 minutes. Then pull the aluminum disc up, put your pan on, and simmer, simmer, simmer.

I'll bet you could also make a giant panini with it (OMG do not do this! Not on a £18,310.50 stove!).

That's pretty nifty, but it has drawbacks. Fortunately Aga has also changed with the times. They know the cast iron setup might be good for simmering, but it takes a long time to boil water. So they include two induction burners on the side as well.

I love an induction stove. My parents have one. Whenever I visit my parents in Arizona, I walk in the door, give them a big ol' hug ... then walk over to the induction stove and start boiling water.

It's so quick! I can't believe it! Then I dump the boiling water down the sink ... because this is Arizona. You don't need boiling water in Arizona. C'mon.

Speaking of which, doesn't all this cast iron heat up your kitchen? Yes. And in fact, Aga counts on this. It is called the Aga Heat, and reportedly it's warm and wonderful. In the UK where heating bills can be really expensive, you can just leave your Aga on full time during the fall, winter and spring. In summer, you might turn it on low at night ... then crank it back to cooking temperature when you need it the next day. It takes a little bit of time to get it back up, but I suppose you get used to it.

This might account for why Agas have not caught on in America. America is warmer and sunnier, and even in the winter, heating a furnace is much cheaper and more convenient than heating an Aga stove.

This does not deter me in the least.

Settling

The Aga store in Edinburgh also sells cookware. Amy and I are living in an AirBnb bereft of many kitchen creature comforts like a food processor. I will buy teaspoons, but I draw the line at buying electrical appliances. (I'm sure as hell not buying them an Aga!)

I decide to get a mortar and pestle. I walk into the Aga store and ask for one. They show me this olive-wood beauty:

It is so nice, after I'm done using it in the AirBnb, I'm going to lug it in my suitcase back to the States.

The shop owner rings it up, "Will that be all sir?"

I say, "Can I also have one of those stoves? It'll fit in an overhead compartment, right?"

He asks, "Where do you live?"

I say, "New York,"

He says. "No problem! We have a store in Manhattan."

I say, "I live about 200 miles away from Manhattan,"

He says, "I'm sure they have a truck for that."

Indeed. The problem is Aga's sold in the United States are not real Aga's. They are just some crappy stove with the Aga name slapped on it. And a large price tag. You will not impress your British expatriate friends in the States. They'll know right off the bat it's a knock-off. And they'll talk behind your back. You know how those Brits are.

That means I'm doomed to a life of trial-and-error cooking. Oh sure, Amy will say, "That's delish!" But deep down in our hearts, we will know it's not Aga-level delish. There will always be something missing.

I'm in a bad mood.

I just got an email from Mary Berry. She wants to come over for dinner again.

God, what a pain in the ass! I think I'll ghost her.