It sits squatly in my kitchen, like the repurposed engine of a battleship. A cast-iron vision in British racing green. 

Indeed, it is quintessentially British – think Mary Berry, think Midsomer Murders – and, at the height of our first love, it was a joy to cook on.

But, for now, and for the foreseeable future, my love affair with my 13-amp electric three-oven Aga is over. 

That’s partly because, in the 16 years since I had the beast installed – which left little change from £9,000 – it has broken down three times. Which rather sticks in the craw when the central selling point for the Aga has long been its reliability.

The real trouble right now, though, is the prohibitive running cost, at least since all our energy bills several years ago ballooned as if someone had just pulled the toggle on an inflatable life-raft.

Blame Vladimir Putin. Liz Truss. The Greens, broader Marxist-Lentilism and Ed ‘Jargon Monoxide’ Miliband.

But, when I last took a terrified peek, a 13-amp three-oven Aga cost £70 to run – £70, my children, a week.

Accordingly, the beast has been off since it threw its last little hissy fit. It still feels rather like a death in the family. 

Had I a cat, it would doubt-less have cast itself upon the mercy of social services.

But, in current energy market conditions, running the world’s greatest cooker is, for the time being, the privilege of the significantly prosperous or the mortgage-free.

Even as Aga celebrated its centenary in 2022, Britain reverberated to the sound of desperate homeowners ripping them out. Calling someone in to dismantle one costs around £500 a pop.

One Blackpool ‘uninstaller’ had, by September that year, accounted for 35 ex-Agas.

The cooker’s history is more involved than you might think. For something so archetypically English, it was actually invented in Sweden – by one Gustaf Dalén, recently blinded in an industrial accident and determined to deliver his missus from her hopelessly involved and smoky range.

But it was in England it took most joyous root. 

Manufacture under licence began in Shropshire in 1929, the Aga swiftly won a rave review in Good Housekeeping – and it was fast taken up by royalty.

Queen Mary and her sister-in-law, Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone (who died in 1981 as Queen Victoria’s last surviving grandchild) were eager early adopters; the Princess Royal, in our own day, has a four-oven job in pillar-box red. You simply cannot buy that sort of publicity.

What Dalén had devised was a solid cast-iron thermostatic cooker, thick with internal insulation and – in an age of cheap and abundant coal – able to run 24/7 and, by the standards of the day, on very economic terms. 

No external part is ever hot enough to burn you and its gentle ambient heat was a bonus for dank farmhouses in an age when few enjoyed central heating.

The essential principle is that, while you start many dishes off on the hotplates (there are two, one for boiling and one for

simmering) you whip them as quickly as possible into the ovens and snap down those famed, round, shiny hotplate covers to conserve energy.

There are but two limitations. You cannot make chips on a trad Aga – at least classically, in a terrifying panful of seething fat – and there is no overhead grill.

Otherwise it’s all about the ovens (you will have between two and four) and precise, experienced shelving of different dishes within those ovens.

It’s a gentle, radiant heat, it calls for you to use your own judgment and the results are ravishingly delicious.

What the Aga is not is a cooker for the sort of foodie who demands precise, detailed recipes – the sort of saddo who once asked Nigel Slater if the teaspoonful of chopped parsley decreed in one recipe should be heaped or round.

The ‘face’ of Aga in our day remains the perennial Mary Berry, who has a long association with the company and wrote its two official cookbooks. 

More unlikely fans include Jamie Oliver. ‘I don’t believe that there’s anything you can’t cook on an Aga,’ enthused the lovable mop-top in 2002.

‘Whacking the thing on the top, browning off some meat, chucking a load of stuff in, and whacking it in the simmering oven and coming back eight hours later and it’s wicked.’

But the man who really made Aga great was the suave David Ogilvy, generally acknowledged as the godfather of modern advertising and who, in 1935, wrote The Theory and Practice of Selling the Aga Cooker.

His tenets were short and shrewd. Approach a household by the back door. Engage not with the mistress, but the cook. 

Laugh at any joke about the Aga Khan as if you had never heard such giddying wit before.

‘Dress quietly and shave well,’ he advised. ‘Do not wear a bowler hat…’

Ogilvy fetched up as the universally revered ‘King of Madison Avenue’ and some of his slogans are for the ages.

‘At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock…’

The Aga’s ease of use, and especially the invaluable ‘holding’ qualities of its simmering oven, were particularly appreciated in the 1920s and 30s as it became ever harder to recruit domestic servants.

One housewife even exclaimed that the simmering oven was as good as having a maid.

But for decades the brand’s hallmark was its conservatism. It was 1956 before you could buy an Aga in any other glossy enamel shade than the classic cream; 1959 before they released an oil-fired version.

And it was as late as 1996 before production of the solid-fuel Aga ceased – largely, I have been told, because it had become so hard to buy the fuel recommended, which was anthracite.

By 2000 the company seemed to lose confidence in itself, a trend that only accelerated after, in 2015, the Aga Rangemaster Group was snapped up by the hard-eyed Americans of the Middleby Corporation.

The range of models and styles is now bewildering, and there has been much emphasis on enabling customers to twiddle the temperature up and down, or off and on.

You can now buy an Aga controlled by your smartphone. But production of oil and gas-fired – and all ‘always-on’ models – stopped in January 2022 and, sadly, the Coalbrookdale foundry ceased in November 2017.

There is still a strong case for the cooker, at least once the energy market is less nonsense on stilts.

If you buy an Aga, it will be delivered to your house in bits and erected swiftly by an expert team.

All other ranges, from the Rayburn to the Esse, come as a single unit and must be collected and installed at your own expense.

Having once had to do it, I can assure you that hoisting a Rayburn from a van into your kitchen is the stuff of Homeric epic.

But you will no longer need an electric kettle, a tumble-drier, a toaster or a sandwich toaster. Depending on the design of your house, you may be able to dispense with the central heating for months on end.

There are generous warranty terms and the cooker should last for the rest of your days: in 2009, as part of a company competition, a 1932 Aga, in Sussex, was found still in happy use.

And you will enjoy a certain way of life: a kitchen to which everyone instinctively gravitates, a table boasting fragrant roasts and unctuous casseroles, and the merry toot of a whistling kettle.

I look forward to resuming it. For now, alas, my Aga Khan’t.