Word: stove
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...stove is British in that it is manufactured solely in Shropshire, in western England, by the Aga-Rayburn company (www.aga-rayburn.co.uk), now a part of the larger Aga Foodservice Group. However, the Aga was invented not in Britain but in Sweden in the 1920s...
...technology, turned his attention to the science of cooking while convalescing at home after being blinded during an experiment with pressurized gases. Traditional kitchen ranges then were temperamental, depending on the manipulation of hot gases through flues. Dalén came up instead with a well-insulated, cast-iron stove that stored warmth efficiently and demanded only a small heat source. The radiant heat also proved successful in cooking food without drying it out, and he named the stove after his company, Svenska Aktiebolaget Gas Accumulator...
...thus helping to usher in the industrial age. Hand-finished right through to its glossy enameled surface, the Aga does not come cheap. At between $7,000 and $15,000, the Aga is at home in big country kitchens full of damp dogs and drying riding gear. But the stove has also become a fashion accessory. "I've sold second-hand Agas to people whose excuse in buying one is that it will be a back-up in case of a power cut," says Tom Harland, an architectural salvage dealer in Devon, in southwest England...
...Hello! and OK!, and there'll often be an Aga somewhere behind all that lip gloss. Its cachet is gold-plated: royal country houses are equipped with Agas, Mel Gibson is a fan, and Tony Blair used to have an Aga before moving to No. 10 Downing Street. The stove has even given its name to a genre of contemporary fiction: "Aga sagas" are about modern families whose lives ebb and flow through Aga-centered kitchens...
...special cast- iron kitchenware in some of the cooker's eight standard colors, expensive training courses given by chefs and cooks around the country, and even a quarterly magazine with proud owners' photographs of Agas in the bosom of their families. Despite this wholesome picture of Aga life, the stove is a daunting prospect for a first-time user. The doors have no conventional handles - they are lifted open and shut like gates. More worrying still, there are no temperature dials to adjust either the hotplates or ovens. So how on earth do you cook? Nervous novices get no comforting...