There are two AGAs at Martins Farm. A single AGA in The Oast, which does the honest work of a holiday kitchen, and a double AGA in the farmhouse, which does rather more and asks for rather more in return. In winter this arrangement is close to perfect. The kitchen is the warmest room on the estate, wet coats dry on the rail without being asked, and the dog arranges himself against the front of the stove with the confidence of a man who has read the tenancy agreement.
In July it is a different proposition entirely.
The thing about an AGA, for anyone who has only admired one in a photograph, is that it does not switch on. It is on. It has been on since somebody lit it, and it will remain on through Easter, through the heatwave, through the afternoon when the thermometer in the yard reads thirty and the kitchen door is propped open with a boot in the vague hope of a draught. You do not cook on an AGA in summer so much as negotiate with a warm and immovable neighbour.
Which is how the barbecue enters the argument.
The case for the barbecue is straightforward and is made, loudly, every year: the heat happens outside, the cooking happens outside, and the person doing it gets to stand in the open air holding tongs and a strong opinion. The case against is made rather more quietly, usually about forty minutes later, when the coals have reached a temperature best described as ambitious in one corner and theoretical in the other, and somebody has to carry a tray of sausages back indoors and finish them in the oven of the thing we were trying to avoid.
This is the part nobody admits at the time. A great many British barbecues are finished by an AGA. The estate has no data on this, and we are not going to pretend otherwise, but we are confident about it.
The honest verdict, after a summer of running the experiment without meaning to, is that the two are not really competitors. The barbecue is for the evening: smoke, the last of the light over the meadow, people standing about with a glass of something cold and no intention of sitting down. The AGA is for everything that must actually be relied upon — bread, a slow shoulder of something, the second tray when the first one turns out to be optimistic, and the entire month of October.
There is also the small matter of the toast, which the barbecue has never once produced satisfactorily and the AGA produces without apparent effort. On this point the household is unanimous.
Which brings us to the plan, and to the reasonable question of judgement. An AGA is intended for the Hathaway Huts when they are built — the two shepherd's huts in the left meadow that will be one stay, not two — so that a guest waking up out there has the same warm iron centre of gravity that the other two kitchens have. Three AGAs on a fifteen-acre High Weald estate, in a century that has invented the induction hob and the air fryer, is not an efficiency. It is a temperament.
Gluttons for punishment, as somebody remarked in the yard, standing next to a barbecue that was still not ready.
Guests at The Oast get the single AGA, a boot room, and full permission to cook outside in the evening and finish it indoors like everybody else. We will not tell anyone.
A great many British barbecues are finished by an AGA. We have no data on this. We are confident about it.