What’s so special about a cooker? Ask anyone who owns, or even anyone who has seen, a Lacanche range cooker and they’ll tell you. A good cooker can make people want to cook, in the same way that a great car can make people want to drive. The Lacanche cooker, which is to the kitchen what some of the UK’s best known small company sports car manufacturers are to the road, is pretty much in a class of its own. It’s beautiful, it’s reliable, it’s outstandingly specced up and it comes in at just the right price.

Lacanche products take their name from a village in the Burgundy region of France – where they have been made for something in the order of 200 years. That’s a heck of a lot of time to have been manufacturing a single product – and that, of course, goes a long way to explain why a Lacanche range cooker is as highly regarded as it is. The Lacanche cooker is the Gallic professional’s oven of choice (indeed, one of France’s top chefs resolutely uses Lacanche and nothing else) – but it has been made to segue seamlessly into the domestic market, with smaller models offering the same performance in more manageable chunks.

Okay – so that might count all these Lacanche cookers as a bit special: but what’s so great about having a professional class cooker in a domestic home? Simple. Pro style cookers that really have the seal of approval of the pros, are sensitive in the same way that those well made cars are responsive – they heat evenly and well, and they allow users to cook like the cook books suggest that they can. A Lacanche range cooker will turn out a Sunday roast that looks and tastes like a Sunday roast should.

As if all this performance and class wasn’t enough, the Lacanche cooker, or at least the genius who designed it, has had the presence of mind to turn on the style in the looks department too. Anyone who fails to stop dead and start coveting, when confronted by the gaudy reds, bright yellows, or clean sky blues of a Lacanche is probably dead. They really do look special – with solid, gorgeously painted iron work and gleaming chrome finishes.

Unlike most range cookers, which are built big and big alone, Lacanche range cookers have been constructed in stepped sizes to suit the needs of every type of kitchen. Professional kitchens can take advantage of models like the Vezelay, a whopping two and a half meter long culinary monster equipped with two 74 litre standard ovens, an 84 litre simmering oven, and an array of hobs that look as though they could propel a starship. Domestic users are able to condense that Lacanche cooker performance into a far more digestible package, with single oven and grill models available at only 700mm wide. Both the Cormatin and Rully models carry 74 litre ovens but fit comfortably into a small kitchen – meaning that Lacanche range cooker performance is available to everyone. They should use it.