Chapter one of my Aga saga

Daunted by her new cooker, Rosie Millard consulted Mary Berry, doyenne of Aga users

I was in no mood to be trifled with as we drove to the 140th destination on our house-hunting mission. ``So it's got an Aga. So what?'' I sniffed to my husband. ``What the hell do we want an Aga for? Don't start thinking I'm going to stay in all the time cooking on it.''

Yet the red, two-oven Aga, warm and friendly in the kitchen, captivated us. We bought the house.

Let's make this clear, though: an Aga is no microwave, or even a somewhat complicated Neff fan-heated number. It is run on gas, oil or solid fuel and, like an old-fashioned range, stays on the whole time, even heating all your water. Two ovens, one very hot, one warm, and two large hot-plates on top, meant I had to rethink how I cooked anything. You cannot adjust the heat, and anything that did not require cooking at gas 9 or gas 2 had me wildly moving pans from one place to another. I needed help.

``Buy Mary Berry's book on Aga cooking,'' advised Aga-using friends in Devon. For those who have not seen her on television, Mrs Berry is the doyenne of Aga cookery and I ploughed with dutiful enthusiasm through her book. I realised she inhabited a kind of joyous world straight from Just William.

As well as creating hearty dumplings in the hot oven, she seemed to spend her time hatching out ducklings incubated in the slow oven, simultaneously airing piles of sheets on the cover of the simmering plate. A labrador called Humble leaps in and out of the kitchen; apple-cheeked children run around, and aged gardeners come in with freshly picked herbs. All the time there is Mary, leaning against her trusty Aga, pheasant casserole cooking within.

This idyll seemed far removed from the north London life of our Aga and so, for further inspiration, I enrolled on ``Making the Most of the Aga'', the most basic of nine Aga courses Mrs Berry has been running for the past five years from her home at Penn, near Beaconsfield.

``My aim is to give people a day to enjoy their Aga, to create even more dishes for their family and for entertaining, and to make pals,'' she begins, looking and sounding rather like a white-haired Julie Andrews. We students are gathered in an elegant drawing-room, having coffee and home-made biscuits. ``Women's loos this way, men's loos in the hall,'' she cries (but as there are only two men to 22 women, such segregation appears a mite severe).

Mrs Berry leads us through to the kitchen. The table has been moved out and 24 chairs arranged in rows before her and her gleaming four-oven monster. 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.

``How long have you had your Aga, Yvonne?'' she asks. We are all wearing name tags and longing for her to address us, so we can talk to her about our Aga. There is mother-of-five Charlotte, who has a four-oven green one, City executive Zoe who has a two-oven cream one, and merchant banker Mark who has one ``for dinner parties''. When Nick, the photographer, admits he has not actually got one, the whole class turns to look at him with pity, before continuing to chat about what fun they are.

``Okey-dokey,'' chirps Mrs Berry briskly. She pulls a tin containing a Yorkshire pudding from the Aga, and raps its crust smartly with a knife. ``Crisp. And perfect. We are in search of perfection.'' We nod back at her.

As well as Yorkshire pudding, we are going to attempt pastry, casseroles, a roast, a cake and creme brulee - a culinary Eiger whose face I have never felt ready to tackle.

Still, Mrs Berry's technique is nothing if not confidence-building; and from advice regarding how to line roasting tins with foil (put the tin upside down and cover, then invert), to making stock and fail-safe pastry, her class is a mine of useful tips.

``Who has cooked a soggy-bottomed quiche?'' she asks the class. Various nods acknowledge guilt. ``I will show you how to cook a perfect quiche. I've chosen to do it in the most difficult dish, a ceramic one; and we will cook it on the floor of the hot oven. The bottom will be perfectly browned. You can only do this with an Aga.''

We watch as Mrs Berry, beneath a mirror angled over the work-surface, prepares the pastry and fills it ``cram-jam'' with onion, bacon and spinach. ``And real double cream. I always buy British cream,'' she says; one feels she would view a tub of creme fraiche or fromage frais with suspicion.

After about half an hour, the quiche reappears from the depths of the Aga, beautifully risen and browned. We all have a bite and suddenly her perfection seems a little bit easier to achieve.

We learn how to make casserole (''after a super day playing tennis this will be perfect for the family''), lemon Swiss roll, treacle bake, salmon in filo pastry, roast fillet of pork and meringues (''in an Aga, as easy as winking''). Forget about roast fennel with polenta; in Mary's kitchen, modern cuisine stops with vegetable stir-fry, which she makes ``for my son and his chums''.

At lunch, we sit in the dining-room at neatly laid tables, drinking dry white wine, eating spicy chicken fricassee and talking madly about Agas. It transpires that the majority of the class do not really need to be here at all. During a ``hands-up'' session on who knew how to cook root vegetables the Mary Berry way, everyone appeared to be old hands at the technique (''boil for five minutes, drain, cover and put on the floor of the Simmering Oven'').

But the oven's built-in flue which wafts away all tell-tale smells of burning has caught most of us out. ``I've once or twice left sausages in my Aga for a week,'' confesses Zoe Dunn. ``When I discovered them they looked like art nouveau. But that's about all the disasters I've had.''

Perhaps the popularity of the day (Mary Berry courses are booking well into 1995) 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. Mrs Berry advises on the whisking of meringues like a ballet teacher teaching plies (''Remember Movement! Always Movement!''), and uses archaic vocabulary such as ``gubbins'', ``wizard'' and ``fun'' (as in, ``Have you seen my new salt cellar? It's rather fun'').

A request for the secret of Welsh rarebit elicits the response, ``Cheese on toast? Good girl! I'm married to a cheese-on-toast man myself'', without any sense of cynicism or irony.

Nevertheless, the food is delicious and I have high hopes of recreating it at home; and indeed, it is refreshing to forget all about ``retro cooking'', ciabatta, balsamic vinegar and fish kettles, and to enjoy the straightforward delights of a lemon Swiss roll.

- Mary Berry's Aga Workshop: 049481 6535. Cost: pounds 65 a day, plus VAT, including lunch. Reductions for group bookings.

(Photograph omitted)