Good Food on the Aga

There are a few thing in this world I covet and one of them is an Aga stove.


The first Aga’s were designed in Sweden, in 1922 by Dr. Gustaf Dalen. The Nobel Prize winner lost his sight. He designed the cooker with the intention of making it easy to use for a blind person. A British manufacturer took over the production and it has been a British made product ever since.

Some people sit around and think of driving a Porsche or a Jaguar but me, I want an Aga. Currently, I am forced to merely own Aga cookbooks instead of the actual stove.

One of my favorites is a reprint of Ambrose Heath’s Good Food on the Aga. I especially love it because the reprint in a Persephone Book. They are the most beautifully done books in recent memory. Many of their books are fiction reprints, but several titles are cookery books and each on features carefully chosen endpapers from historic fabrics. Good Food on the Aga was published in 1933. The endpapers were designed in the same year by Bernard Adeney. The block-printed linen furnishing fabric was designed for Allan Walton Textiles.



Ambrose Heath wrote over 70 books between 1932 and 1968. Many of them were cookery books. In Good Food on the Aga, Heath lays out the advantages of the Aga and basic cooking techniques. Remember, it is 1933, so the Aga he is describing is coal-burning type. Occasionally, an old wood or coal burning Aga come up for sale.

This book is divided into months of the year. Each month begins with a listing of what foods one can expect to be fresh and available during that month. Then he gives you a list of the recipes to correspond. Each recipe is listed on the side of the page. Underneath the recipe is a list of ingredients. A list is all. Vague amounts are listed within the recipes. It is very old-fashioned. Cooking with this book is a bit of an adventure, so it is more important than ever to read the recipe fully.

In August, Heath recommends the following:

Iced Polish Soup

Beetroot
Cucumber
Egg
Parsley
Chervil

I read somewhere the other day of an iced vegetable soup from Poland which sounded appropriate for August evenings. A beetroot cut in very small pieces was cooked in salt water, while this was being done half a cucumber cut in thin slices was sprinkled with salt so that the water was exuded. The beetroot, cucumber, cucumber water, and the water in which the beetroot had been cooked were mixed together when cold, and to this were added slices of hard boiled eggs, chopped parsley and chervil, pepper and one well-beaten egg. It must be kept well iced, and at the very last moment pieces of ice were put into the individual cups in which the soup was served. I have not tried it yet, but I certainly shall do so.

I love the convoluted way the recipe is written and even more so that he included it in a cookbook with out ever trying it. Well, we haven’t tried it either. If Ambrose Heath hasn’t tried it, neither are we. Some brave soul out there needs to make it and let us know how it tastes

Kitchen Essays

Agnes Jekyll was the sister-in-law of famous garden designer Gertrude Jekyll. It has been said that if Gertrude Jekyll was an artist-gardener, then Agnes was an artist-housekeeper. Mary Lutyens, the daughter of designer Edwin Lutyens, described Agnes Jekyll’s house as, “the apogee of opulent comfort and order without grandeur, smelling of pot-pouri, furniture polish and wood smoke.”



Her witty kitchen essays offer tips and recipes for many occasions. Her notes on a first dinner party fail to reveal that Agnes Jekyll's first dinner party included Robert Browning, John Ruskin, and Edward Burne-Jones, so the bar is set a bit high! But if you follow these simple steps you can invite anyone you please.

Their First Dinner Party

It must not err on the side of parsimony, nor yet by its lavishness vex those new relations or old aunts whose attitude has been characterized as “affectionate but hostile.”

“Not fewer in number than the Graces, nor yet exceeding the Muses,” runs an old adage regarding the perfect party.*

If you can establish a name for having good food…friends will grow lyrical over your cold mutton.

Julienne Soup

Clear soup gives the cook her first chance, and already a dress rehearsal will have given a taster of it’s quality. Having attained to a taste of its quality. Having attained a well-flavoured consommé, cut some carrots, onions, celery, turnips, into a small dice, if for a Brunoise; and into fine strips with the green parts of leeks added, if for Julienne. Cook these slowly to a golden color in plenty of butter for an hour (the butter does again for similar purposes), and sprinkle them lightly with white sugar. Drain them dry, put them into the simmering consommé, and let them gently cook from 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

Julienne soup sounded fun, but I must tell you that cooking julienned carrots for an hour in butter and then 2 hours in a consommé leads me to believe there will be gracious little "julienne" in that broth. Seriously, cooking carrots, turnips and onions for three hours gives you mush, but it must have been good mush because John Ruskin never complained.



Kitchen Essays is another in the series of books published by Persephone Books. Persephone Books is a small British press that reprints lovely copies of lost classics. The plain grey covers give way to glorious endpapers like the ones in Kitchen Essays, taken from a printed silk designed by George Sheringham for Seftons in 1922. (Yes the covers are a respectable light grey and not that dark flannel that came out in the above photo. Rest assured I am a better cook than photographer.) Check out They Can't Ration These, another Persephone Book featured at Cookbook of the Day.

* Three Graces and Nine Muses -- add in yourself as the Hostess and your dinner party should be 4 to 10 people. Don't set out the caviar for those bitchy "aunts," you weren't good enough for their nephew anyway. But do try the julienne soup with that cold mutton and old girls should wax positively lyrical.

Of course, if they like it too much, you might have to invite them again. What a dilemma.

They Can’t Ration These

The news these days has been filled with job loss and crashing stocks. I pulled out a lovely reprint of a book first published in 1940 in Britain. The book was written during the height of rationing brought on by the war and while we are not yet rationing, there might just be some things we can learn in They Can't Ration These by Vicomte de Mauduit.

In his preface he states:

The object of this book is to show where to seek and how to use Nature’s larder, which in times of peace and plenty people overlook and ignore.

The Vicomte was quite a guy. He was a cavalry officer, and aviator in World War I, an engineer in Egypt and a cookbook author. During World War II he was believed to have been captured by the Nazi and to have died in Germany. He ignore’s nothing that we might need to know in those (and these) sparse times. We are told how to make soap, how to use horse-radish to “cure “ freckles, and how to find wild bird eggs. There are an array of nifty recipes for hedgehog, squirrel, frogs and various other small winged creatures from Rooks to starlings. As for their eggs, be warned:

When Handling Eggs

If you suffer from a cut on the hands, be careful when breaking eggs that the cut is not in contact with the white, and in all cases if your fingers have been in contact with the white of eggs do not rub your eyes. The white of the eggs, or albumen, is equal in chemicals to the venom of the rattlesnake.

Who knew? It seems a bit odd that I can eat the eggs but not get the whites in my eyes.

Some of the recipes are so unencumbered, they seem to the modern reader to be comical. Truth be told, as someone who cooks a lot, I rather like these bare boned recipes!

Baked Bream

Clean, wash and wipe the fish, then wrap it in a buttered paper and bake in a moderate oven for about half an hour.

This lovely reprint of They Can’t Ration These was done by Persephone Books in London. Each of their reprints are done in simple grey card stock with endpapers taken from old wallpapers and textiles. For the Vicomte's book they chose "October" from a a fabric designed by Alma Ramsey-Hosking. Using the same inventiveness needed to persevere in 1940's rationing, Ramsey-Hosking's fabric was printed at her kitchen table using potato prints and paint on sugar paper. If you are unfamiliar with Persephone Books, take a look at their web site or visit them in London and linger.