How AGA Became an Icon
T
he AGA cooker is a way of life. It commands
levels of adulation more oen associated
with the latest boy band and generates
similar loyalties. One woman taking part in an AGA
demonstration went so far as to insist it was warmer,
more reliable and infinitely better looking than most
men and that, given the choice between her husband
and her AGA, she’d waste no time packing his bags!
e inventor of the AGA cooker in 1922 was
Dr Gustaf Dalén, could have imagined the heady
heights of fame that his creation would go on to
reach. Dalén, an entrepreneur and a Nobel Prize-
winning engineer and devoted husband. Intellectually
and commercially, he wanted to create an efficient
stove that would free his wife from domestic drudgery
and address the engineering question of how best to
get heat from its source into the food. Radiant heat
from the cast-iron walls of the AGA cooker’s ovens
provided the answer.
Now, the AGA cooker once most associated with
rambling country piles and farmhouse kitchens
complete with orphan lambs and sodden spaniels is
just at home in an über-hip metropolitan
environment. e modern version is setting out to be
a world class cooker, able to take on all cookery styles
whatever their origins.
For the world’s most famous cooker is now also the
globe’s coolest cooker. Its enduring good looks are
seducing yet another new audience. Today, it finds
itself dancing chic-to-chic with a more independently
minded, more metropolitan consumer and wherever
you are in the world you can have an AGA cooker
that works for you.
e AGA boasts a peerless pedigree and is today cast
in iron at the historic Coalbrookdale foundry in the
Shropshire hills that is a World Heritage Site and
was at the very birthplace of the Industrial Revolution
when, in 1709, Abraham Darby first smelted iron ore
with coke to make cooking pots.
Its design has been allowed to evolve with care to the
point where the cooker’s look has now achieved icon
status. e special place it occupies in the hearts and
minds of owners is unique and undeniable.
q
forEWord
Inventor of the AGA cooker, Dr Gustaf Dalén,
a Nobel Prize-winning physicist
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How e AGA Became An Icon
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