Small steps to resilience: cooking with a haybox
The summer-just-gone, while volunteering at a green festival, I attended a workshop on haybox cooking. I’d been carrying the image of a haybox — effectively a thermal stove which uses insulation to slow-cook contents that have been heated via hob or flame — in my mind’s eye since childhood, when one of my favourite books was The Children Who Lived in a Barn.
Published in 1938, the book tells the story of how five children maintain their independence when their parents fail to return from an emergency visit to Granny. If the do-gooding ladies of their village get their way, the children will be split up and sent to orphanages and adoptive families. So, turfed out of their rented home, they take up the local farmer’s offer of a barn and live as best they can on a tiny allowance from their father’s bank manager.
I don’t know why, of all the vivid details in the story, the single image that endured over the decades was that of the haybox. The barn had only a stove intended for heating sheep dip, so cooking was limited and entirely dependent on wood gathered from round about. So when a local tells them about a contraption that turns hot meat and veg into a casserole over the course of the day, the children leap at the idea. The oldest boy makes a wooden box lined with newspaper and hay and from then on the children have a hot dinner when they come in from school.
Somehow, my child-mind latched onto this pleasing image of self-sufficiency and the bounty of natural processes long before I had any notion of utility bills or energy crises.
Back in the future, the funny thing was that as soon as the workshop leader starting speaking, I remembered I’d been using the same fuel less method to part-cook for years. Sometimes I’ll start off a casserole and wrap it in a towel so that carries on cooking while I’m out. For the full process, the workshop leader advised taking whatever came to hand: a wicker basket or a cardboard box for the container and old duvets, sleeping bags or crunched-up newspaper for the insulation. In her experience, hay did not work well, and neither did wool (a remark that generated some workshop politics when an attendee left in disgust, afterwards telling me she wasn’t going to take any lessons from someone who was ‘negative’ towards wool.)
My initial efforts at haybox cooking met with only moderate success. My haybox is a polystyrene box with a fitted lid that I found with the discarded cardboard outside a local shop. An oblong cushion that had been made by my mother to cover the casserole is an exact fit. But while everything I put in to the box, from boeuf bourguignon to homemade baked beans, was cooked, the result had more liquid than I was used to and wasn’t particularly hot.
Part of the problem was the insulation: in the spirit of using whatever comes to hand, I’d been wrapping the pot in a swathe of lining fabric. It isn’t thick enough: a towel is better. I’d also disregarded the instruction to bring the pot to the boil with the lid on. The results from actually following the advice have been better and I’ve come home to the smell of a stew which has spent less than twenty minutes on the hob.
Those new to hayboxes will gradually find the materials and methods that work for them: just as in cultures where traditional dishes vary according to the cook, everyone has their own recipe. If you want to give fuel-less cooking a go, you’ll find a demonstration video with the workshop leader Jane Segaran here, and further advice about from wartime food leader Utility Jude here.
You can find a longer version of this piece at my Substack, Ways of Seeing