Has the Aga had its day?

A whole chicken, not so much roasted as burnt to a crisp. Charred potatoes. Carrots so blackened they were welded to the pan. And don’t even get me started on the Yorkshire puddings, which resembled lumps of coal, still smoking amid the debris. Only once have I failed (catastrophically I might add, and in front of my entire extended family) to cook an edible roast dinner. And I blame the Aga.

Long a middle-class status symbol, Agas – in varying shades of duck-egg blue and volcanic red – can be found in country piles, cosy cottages and even the odd city kitchen. Devotees rhapsodise about the cast-iron cookers, which cost upwards of £10,000, stay on 24/7 gobbling up energy and require specialist cookbooks to conquer their idiosyncratic ways.

There is, they claim, a certain ceremony to cooking with an Aga: the low rumble as it heats up, the strange clanking sounds from within (often in the middle of the night), the warm gusts of air that flood the room when you open one of its many cavernous hollows.