AGA Cooker

The AGA is a squat, heavy cooker of enamelled cast iron, standing on the kitchen floor like a piece of furniture. Two round hotplates sit on its top under domed, hinged lids, one for boiling and one for simmering. On the front, a column of square doors opens on cast-iron ovens. There are no knobs to speak of. The whole body holds heat and gives it back slowly, so the ovens cook by radiant warmth from every surface rather than by a flame or element.

It was invented by Gustaf Dalén, the Swedish physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1912 for his automatic lighthouse equipment and was blinded the same year in an explosion. Housebound, he set out to make a stove that needed little tending. He patented it in 1922, worked on it in his own kitchen at Lidingö, and his company AGA put it on sale in Sweden in 1929. It burned a measured amount of coke, day and night, and stored the heat in its iron.

Britain took to it at once. A licensee began selling and making it in 1929, and by the mid-1930s advertisements offered the two-oven New Standard model for six shillings a week. The young David Ogilvy was hired to sell it and wrote its 1935 sales manual. Production settled at the old Coalbrookdale ironworks in Shropshire, and after 1957 the cooker was made only in England.

Fuel changed with the century: oil from 1964, gas from 1968 and electricity from 1985, and today's cookers are electric only. Colours spread from the original cream to a long chart of enamels. The AGA Classic 100 on this page keeps the idea that defined the first one, an iron cooker that is always warm and always ready, with its hotplates and lids where Dalén put them.