Mary Berry

by A. S. Dagnell

  As the cookers became increasingly popular, with exports to the US growing rapidly, Mary’s own involvement with the Aga started to develop a life of its own. Having cooked with Agas for most of her adult life, Mary decided to put these skills to good use. It so happened that this decision coincided with that time in her life when she felt she needed to be at home. Having written scores of cookbooks already, Mary suggested that she should write one relating specifically to the Aga. She published The Aga Book in 1994 – and it immediately won rave reviews, establishing Mary Berry as the definitive Aga writer, with the Mail on Sunday’s You magazine boldly declaring: ‘Mary Berry is to Aga what Pavarotti is to opera’. The book was filled with scores of recipes for comfort food, including Leek and Stilton Soup and Spiced Treacle Gammon – which serves up to 18 people – plus Mary’s various other speciality cake recipes. Ever practical, Mary cleverly made sure that you could cook the recipes without having to own one of the status-symbol cookers, with each recipe including instructions for producing them at normal cooking temperatures in conventional ovens. It also meant the books didn’t have a closed-off market and would appeal to anyone who was a fan of Mary’s books. Unsurprisingly, they all became best-sellers. More books relating to Aga cooking followed, and she encouraged her loyal PA Lucy to write some too. Mary’s original book is still in print and, even today, if you buy an Aga and are worried by the relatively large price tag you can take some comfort in the fact that you’ll also be handed a copy of Mary’s The Aga Book for free. Mary, however, is quite dismissive of the hype that surrounds her involvement with the Aga. ‘I’m called the Aga Queen or some such rubbish!’ she once said.

  In the wake of William’s death, Mary was to find another use for her trusty Aga. The devastation wrought by the tragedy understandably contributed to her decision not to continue commuting between London and Buckinghamshire. She decided that, with the help of Lucy, she would host Aga Workshops from home, teaching owners to make the most of the cooker’s different features using recipes they could easily replicate in their own kitchens. This would allow her to be at home with her family while continuing to work. And on top of this, it would give her even more time to spend with her beloved Aga.

  When asked by Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs whether she made the decision to hold the workshops because she wasn’t sure she could ‘do something out in the big bad world right now’, Mary replied: ‘That is exactly how it was. When William died, I … it [wa]s just shattering. And I didn’t want to leave Paul, I didn’t want to leave the family; I thought, what can I do from home? And having written the Aga book, I knew a lot about it. So I thought nobody is doing a school, I will do it. And we had a steady flow of people and we were always full.’

  Mary’s cookery school quickly became hugely popular and massively respected. At one point, you had to book up to a year in advance for a spot on one of her courses. Often she would have to cook for as many as 20 people twice a week. Mary tried to keep the numbers limited, however, to allow time for tastings, discussions and a question-and-answer session. The Aga would be used to cook 12 dishes for the class sessions, as well as the lunches for anyone taking part. Adverts for the classes ran in local and national newspapers. One of the first adverts for the courses was placed in the Independent newspaper in 1990. Mary penned it herself, and it read: ‘The cookery writer Mary Berry gives small classes at her home in Buckinghamshire on working with an Aga cooker. The day-long classes include sessions for new owners, keen bakers and Christmas or dinner party menus.’ Email and the web weren’t a feature of everyday life back then, so anyone interested in finding out further information was asked to write to Mary at Watercroft. Another advert a few years later, in 1999, in the London Evening Standard said: ‘Cookery writer Mary Berry runs informal workshops from her Buckinghamshire home. Numbers are limited to 20, to allow time for tastings and a discussion. Lunch is included in the price of £97.52 for one day and £195.05 for two days. A gift card is sent to anyone receiving the workshop as a present.’

  In the mid-1990s, five years after the courses were launched, the Independent’s Rosie Millard was dispatched to try a course out for herself and write it up as a feature. At the time she had recently acquired an Aga and, by her own admission, was struggling to understand how to make the best of it. A friend, who had recently bought Mary’s Aga cookbook, recommended that Rosie sign up for Mary’s classes to get to grips with her new toy. She enrolled in Making the Most of the Aga, the most basic of nine Aga courses Mary ran.

  Millard took readers through a typical day on one of the courses. Mary started the day by telling the group her aim was to teach people how they could embrace their Aga and use it as efficiently as possible to cook for their family, as well as entertaining friends and relatives – and how to simply enjoy it. Millard observed that Mary was ‘looking and sounding rather like a white-haired Julie Andrews’. At first, the participants were gathered in the elegant drawing room at Watercroft for coffee and home-made biscuits, before Mary gave them a tour of her home, finally ending up in the kitchen where the stage had been set for the rest of the day. ‘The table has been moved out and 24 chairs arranged in rows before her and her gleaming four-oven monster,’ wrote Millard. ‘Two women in aprons cluck around behind her. Throughout the day, they provide things such as egg white or chopped parsley with silent efficiency; but Mrs Berry is the star.’

  All sorts of different people would attend Mary’s classes – from mothers with large families to City traders. The differing backgrounds of the people taking her courses was something Mary embraced. She said in an interview with The Times that some of her clients returned up to 14 times, and that the vast majority weren’t stay-at-home mothers whose life was dedicated to baking. ‘My people at workshops tell me all sorts of stories,’ said Mary. ‘Like, “I don’t mind my husband going but I don’t want to lose the Aga.” Or, if they are getting divorced, “It’s bad enough losing him but not the Aga, too.”’

  During the course, Millard was taught to make Yorkshire puddings, as well as a roast, a cake, a casserole, a lemon Swiss roll, a treacle bake, salmon in filo pastry, roast fillet of pork, meringues and crème brûlée… before moving on to the titan of baking dishes – the quiche. ‘Still, Mrs Berry’s technique is nothing if not confidence-building,’ wrote Millard. Mary gave the class all manner of advice. Everything from how to line a roasting tin with foil to mastering the difficult task of making pastry that didn’t crumble. Mary also taught them how to avoid her ultimate faux-pas – the soggy bottom, which would later come to become one of her buzz phrases on the Great British Bake Off. After the morning session, Mary would then invite her students into the dining room for lunch, where they would chat away the afternoon, exchanging stories about their lives and experiences with their Aga while sipping white wine and eating spicy chicken fricassée. But while the Aga was undoubtedly a revolutionary piece of kitchen equipment both in the way it cooked and its multi-faceted uses aside from food preparation, Millard realised there was another reason why Mary managed to make it so popular. The food she cooked wasn’t elaborate nouveau cuisine, but honest fare that filled a spot. She said: ‘Perhaps the popularity of the day is not due to an Aga being a terrifying piece of equipment needing hours of tuition to master, but to a sort of culinary comfort factor. The course propounds the delights of old-fashioned, familiar things such as Kenwood Chefs and mashed potato, and there is no worrying trip into the language of haute cuisine.’

  As Mary’s workshops became famous around the UK, their popularity surged, with Aga lovers clamouring for a place. In the introduction to a new edition of The Aga Book, Mary said that owning one of the ovens gave people a sense of inclusion and that it was ‘like joining the best club in the country … when you meet another Aga owner it is like discovering an instant friend. The Aga gives you a welcome. It’s warm and it’s ready,’ she wrote. ‘Those who knock it are used to conventional cookers and have never actually taken the trouble to understand it.’


  And if anything demonstrated how owning an Aga had become such an exclusive club, it was a piece in the Daily Telegraph in 2009. The newspaper went on a quest to work out who in Britain owned the oldest Aga. In conjunction with Aga, the broadsheet asked readers to find the earliest example of the classic stove still in domestic use and to include any unusual stories about it. Agas had become known for their durability. These weren’t cookers that would simply be used for a few years until the next kitchen refurbishment. Many would last decades and continue to operate for more than 50 years. And so to celebrate this longevity, as well as the company’s 300th anniversary, the competition was launched. Thousands entered with all sorts of weird, wonderful and colourful stories about the history of their own heat-storage cookers which demonstrated the rich cultural history that the Aga brought with it. ‘Osbert Hicks from St Agnes on the Isles of Scilly, for example, has a 1937 Aga installed by his parents that is still in daily use,’ wrote Daily Telegraph journalist Adam Edwards. ‘John Fowler’s 1938 model that is thundering away in Essex has survived both bombs and doodlebugs. Karen Hamilton from Moray in Scotland has a 60-year-old machine that was completely flooded in the fifties. It was soon back in service, but the saucepan of soup that had been cooking on the hot plate was not found for another two weeks.’

  Meanwhile another reader, Nicky Gill, from Dorset, remembered her Aunt Maidie’s Aga being used for purposes quite different to cooking during the 1940s. ‘She was a matronly figure with a booming voice and a magnificent bosom who would return from bracing winter walks and beg a few moments alone in the kitchen,’ wrote Nicky. ‘If the kitchen door was ajar we could see Auntie Maidie raise her jumper, lean over the hot plates and emit a deep sigh while uttering the words “ah, one of life’s great pleasures”.’

  Many of the Agas entered for the competition had been found hidden behind false walls or cupboards. “When we moved into our house in 1976 we asked the builders to remove the kitchen wall cupboards,” wrote Mrs S Hindmarch from Danbury, Essex. “When they pulled them away from the wall they found a beautifully cleaned Aga with all tools wrapped in oil cloths placed inside the oven. It must have been there for at least 18 years.”

  But the oldest Aga belonged to the Hett family, from Sussex. In 1932, the family decided it was about time to join the world of modern cooking and subsequently had the state-of-the-art foreign cooker installed in their home. It was the same year, the Daily Telegraph noted, that the celebrated author Aldous Huxley released his international best-selling book Brave New World. Indeed, the Hett family did join the brave new world of cooking … and still have the evidence to prove it. Even in 2009, some 77 years after the Aga was first installed, 80-year-old Stewart Hett was still basking in the joys of the very same heat-storage cooker. He was still living in the same house that his parents had bought and was still cooking on the exact same stove. He duly won the award for owning the oldest continuous working domestic Aga, after Aga expert Richard Maggs confirmed that the Hett Aga was a genuine 1932 stove. ‘It is perhaps not in the best of nick,’ Edwards wrote in the piece. ‘A side-oven door broke and was substituted with a bit of rough steel. At some stage the old cream enamel hot-plate lids must have been replaced by aluminium jobs and the whole machine now looks as if it would only work properly if it was overseen by the cartoonist Heath. And yet it potters on regardless, with the same reliability and simplicity of purpose as a Zippo [cigarette lighter].’ The Hett family’s Aga was later moved and installed in the reception area of Aga’s Coalbrookdale foundry.

  But it wasn’t just Brits who embraced the Aga. America was discovering a love for the double-plated stove, and Hollywood stars were apparently snapping up the fashionable cooker. Whereas it cost around £4,000 for a mid-range model (including installation) in the UK, the price tag in the US was an eye-watering $15,000 (approximately £10,000). Even so, in 1997, 300 had been installed across the whole of the US – that’s the equivalent of six in each state. The trend appeared to be started by the prestigious TIME magazine, which dedicated a three-page feature to the Great British Stove. Back in Britain the Daily Express was reporting that movie stars including Julia Roberts and Dustin Hoffman had invested in the stove. ‘Forget fashion or fragrance, the latest must-have in America is nothing less than an old-fashioned British cooker,’ the Daily Express said. ‘Americans covet our history because they haven’t any of their own, and the closest way they can attain this is to buy British.’

  And as the popularity of the Aga grew in America, word reached the other side of the pond about Mary’s courses. She was even asked to fly to the States to deliver some of her classes. ‘I don’t know about Hollywood,’ said Mary in The Times. ‘But I went to America last year to do Aga Workshops – Atlanta, New York and around – and America is the perfect place because if you are rich there you have two houses and one is in the mountains, and what better welcome can you get than from an Aga?’ Americans were also starting to fly to England to take Mary’s classes at Watercroft.

  Other than Hollywood, other celebrities were soon celebrating the joys of the Aga, including Rick Stein, John Nettles and Robbie Coltrane. Sharon Stone even suggested that her Aga would be the first thing she’d try to rescue if her house caught fire. The model Jodie Kidd added her backing, saying: ‘I was brought up around the Aga. It has always symbolised for me such wonderful things: good food, warmth and protection.’

  Poetry entertainer Pam Ayres, who lives at Poulton, near Cirencester, said she had been an early convert to the Aga for many of the same reasons that Mary enjoyed using it. ‘I love the Aga,’ she said in an interview. ‘It really is a family friend. I feel very affectionate towards it. It’s always there when you need it. I have it on all year round. People come into the kitchen and automatically lounge against it. It’s a warm focal point. The dog and I always sit with our backs against it. Lovely! The drying rack over it has seen some history – drying all my sons’ clothes, from tiny baby bits to huge rugby shirts. And when we tried our hand at farming, with a herd of 50 sheep, it saved the life of a lamb. It was weak and dying and we put it in the bottom oven of the Aga and it brought it back to life. I also dry herbs, flowers and kidney beans in it, iron my tea towels on it and raise yeast for bread in it. Without the Aga I’d be raising yeast in the airing cupboard and cranking up the oven to the right temperature every time I wanted to make dinner. I don’t know what I’d do without it.’

  Meanwhile Jamie Oliver admitted he too was a fan of the Aga, after he got one just a few years ago in his family home. With his wife Jools and four children to look after, he says it gets put to good and regular use. Finding their dream house was exciting, and installing an Aga in the kitchen was the cherry on the cake, especially as Jools had wanted one since the couple got married. Besides, a stainless-steel appliance wasn’t going to look right. ‘I don’t believe there’s anything you can’t cook on an Aga. The way I cook these days is, if I’m going to have breakfast, I’ve got about four minutes to do it. So I do need that immediate heat. If I have to wait for a grill to pre-heat – even if it’s just five minutes – then it’s impossible: I’m late. So it’s a lifestyle thing as well.’ Jamie drew parallels between people who learn how to get the most out of their Aga by really understanding cooking, and committed vegetarians, believing that serious vegetarians who love food are good cooks ‘because they have to duck and dive a little bit to get around the fact they’re not eating meat.’

  Mary’s workshops ran for some 16 years – a length of time she could never have imagined when she first came up with the idea. In total, she welcomed over 12,000 into her home at Watercroft for classes. But as Mary got older and her media schedule became ever busier, balancing the classes with the rest of her career became difficult, so she made the tough decision to give up teaching them. But, realising there was still a demand for the classes, she came up with a plan. Her long-time assistant Lucy had always lent a hand during her classes, and it seemed like the perfect idea to pass the baton to her. So, whil
e Mary has retired from teaching, a new generation of Aga lovers is being taught by Lucy, who now runs the workshops. Writing on her website, Mary said: ‘I can honestly say I have enjoyed each day, thanks to our guests and the support from Lucy and the home team. Alas, the time came for me to slow down a little and spend more time with Paul and the family. I will still be doing bits and bobs, TV, radio, and some demonstrations around the country so you may see me on your travels, but the Aga Workshops at Watercroft have finished, so it’s now over to Lucy. Lucy has been with me the whole journey and we have loved every second; we have been privileged to meet and become friends with so many Aga owners over the years. Lucy will still be working with me part-time, helping me with my TV and radio programmes, books and so forth but she will also be doing her own books, writing and demonstrations. Lucy will continue the Aga Workshops in the future – travelling to Aga shops and cookery schools around the country … Thank you for all your wonderful support.’

  But while the support for Mary’s courses was undeniable, the Aga’s history has also been peppered with some controversies. Feminists claimed the stove was forcing women to feel chained to their kitchen. ‘The Aga backlash has begun,’ declared The Times in 1996. ‘A campaign against the hearty, hearthy home cooking of Delia Smith is to be launched today. The Cooks Off Club aims to get women out of the kitchen, and its launch has already boiled over into a sizzling row about the merits of the kitchen stove.’ The anti-Aga movement was led by the writer Sue Limb, who used Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour as her soapbox. She poked fun at women who were ‘stove slaves’ and the programme was overwhelmed by the response. ‘We realised that there are an awful lot of people who hate cooking but are afraid to admit it,’ the programme’s producer, Jane O’Rourke, said at the time. ‘We will be asking people to send in ideas on how to avoid cooking and to re-educate people to enjoy raw food.’