Aga

Last weekend we were house guests in Cambridge, and among the many delights there -- good company and Boucle d'Or, Evensong at King's College, a walk at Wicken Fen, and being away from the Big Smoke -- was getting acquainted with an Aga stove and all that it could do.  This is a comparable model, from the Aga web site.

  The principle of the Aga is that is it always on (BTUs on demand).  The inventor was a serious physicist and had something to do with propane.  OK.  The heat in the Aga circulates throughout the stove: each of the four ovens pictured above is at a different temperature; the left hand burner on top is hot, the right hand is simmer (there is a warming plate on the left hand side.  There is a smaller version, for folks like those who built Falling Water in Pennsylvania, that omits a couple of ovens and the warming plate.)

The advice book for the Aga suggests that one would plan to do 80% of the cooking in the ovens, 20% on top.  To adjust the heat on top, you move your plan to be squarely on the burner, or perhaps off to the side.  The hot burner will boil water (in a special kettle) in a flash; toast your bread held between special grids.  The simmer burner will do sausage and eggs for an English breakfast (in sequence, not at the same time).  Another Aga secret is silicon pads: to fry eggs, for example, you put the pad on the burner, crack the eggs on the pad, and cover. Voila.  The ovens require special pans that fit on runners -- kind of like a lateral file.  Higher in each oven is warmer; lower is cooler. You warm plates, for example, in the coolest of the ovens.  You can do bacon for that English breakfast in one of the ovens.  You move around your roasted vegetables and roasted meats as necessary for the right cooking temperature.
It certainly dominates our no-name electric cooker in Bloomsbury!!
Of course, every pot or roasting rack absorbs heat, so if there is a lot going on in the Aga (say, pork belly in one of the ovens, roasted root vegetables in another, roasted whole shallots in a third, orange marmalade on top), the heat tends to diminish.  One can adjust the overall heat -- we were told that it takes 6-8 hours for the adjustment to become effective, kind of like turning an oil tanker.
The next question, of course: in what climates would such a cooker be appropriate, one that is always on and generating heat in the kitchen?  England!!  Or a colonial kitchen, in which the cooking is done in an open shed in the back garden.  Or Fallingwater, where the work of the weekend home is done far away from the ease of the weekend hosts and guests.  Somehow, it does not seem a great idea for your average central Illinois summer.  Walking into such a kitchen - the smell is spectacular. Pork belly, bacon, marmalade, ...

But in the right climate, it is the cook's equivalent of a manual transmission car, or writing your own code on the computer, in other words, of taking charge of your own heat source.  And it looks fabulous!!