Several years I met a rather wonderful hippie elder, who told me that she used to make yoghurt in bed in the seventies; if you heated the milk in the morning and put it under the duvet it would stay warm and fermenting all day and by evening you would not only have homemade yoghurt but a nice warm bed as a bonus. This sounded like an excellent idea so I gave it a try. Perhaps beds in the seventies were more stable, jars more waterproof or cats less inquisitive but in any case I ended up with a rather soggy, whiffy mess and have not repeated the experiment.
Nonetheless I remained curious about using insulation to keep things that needed long slow cooking warm without further heating, and in what I’m generously calling “my research” instead of “time I wasted going down internet rabbit holes” I came across the concept of the haybox. This is exactly what it says on the tin: a box packed with hay or other commonly available insulation material into which a pan of hot food can be placed and left to cook in its residual heat. These were widely recommended in UK government pamphlets during the First and Second World War as a way to save fuel, and the fact that they could be left to cook by themselves for six to eight hours while housewives got on with the million other domestic tasks expected of them probably didn’t hurt either.
The Wonderbag is simply a more portable, ready made version of the same thing that uses fabric to contain the insulation rather than a box. It’s a great company that uses the profits from selling the insulated bags in richer countries to subsidise them in the majority world where they can make a real difference to the time women and girls have to spend collecting firewood, so if you wanted to buy one I certainly wouldn’t discourage you, but at the same time it’s perfectly possible to make something just as effective yourself without having to spend £63 and by reusing what would otherwise be waste materials.
I had some time on my hands and a lot of large carboard boxes left over from moving, so when a couple of bags of straw showed up on the sharing app Olio I decided to give it a go with a pan of rice.
It was not what I would call an unqualified success, though at least I didn’t have to wait for it to dry out to go to bed this time. Although I put straw on top of the pan, the rice at the top didn’t cook through which I now realise was probably because this part wasn’t sufficiently insulated and the vents in the lid allowed too much steam to escape. A bit of troubleshooting with the help of friends online and in real life, some of whom had used hayboxes in Girl Guides or in the army, and I was ready to give it another go, this time using a cast iron pan.
This is the point at which things rapidly become less accessible. Up until now all the materials I had used had been readily available and free (cardboard box, straw) or the sort of thing most people would already have (a saucepan, the towel I used to line the box and stop straw going everywhere). Using a cast iron casserole made a huge difference, I’m assuming because the greater mass of metal retained heat and the lid was a tighter fit so less steam escaped taking heat with it, but while it is possible to find good second hand cast iron cookware particularly at country fairs, or a lucky strike in charity shops or car boot sales, it can be expensive. It is also very heavy and so difficult for those who may difficulties with manual dexterity, and with rented accommodation so insecure in the UK these days and so many people facing the threat of frequent and unwanted moves heavy cookware can be a bit of a burden to carry around.
SF Innovations, who run workshops in haybox cooking as well as solar cooking and rocket stoves and whose website is well worth a visit, have a number of suggestions for overcoming the limitations of thinner pans. These include:
- Filling the pan 3/4 full, so that more of the volume is taken up with heat-retaining food and water and less with air.
- Packing any holes in the lid with tin foil to prevent steam escaping.
- Even more insulation. Always more insulation
I used straw because when I was first reading up about hayboxes that was what was suggested in instructions from the early 20th century. However we now have far more insulation materials available to us than our grandparents did, many of which may be cheaper and more accessible than straw is. Old duvets or sleeping bags or their reused stuffing would work, and I have recently upgraded my haybox with a layer of WoolCool insulation which is used around many fresh food deliveries – it’s always worth asking around for this at work or on Olio as a lot of people will be getting it in meal delivery kit boxes and then not know how to dispose of it. (The fact that we dedicate land to raising sheep to produce wool that is so low value it’s used to make single use packaging is an issue for another blog post). For people on Facebook the excellent group Wonderbag and Haybox Cooking UK is full of creative ideas for insulation across the whole spectrum of effort from hand sewn quilted Wonderbags to old cushions stuffed in a broken fridge.
The facebook group above links to a lot of good haybox recipes, and you can find more in this book by Jane and Seggy Segaran of SF innovations, but the general formula I’ve found for haybox stews is:
- Flavour. Always an onion, often garlic or ginger or both. Traditional English stew spices like nutmeg and white pepper, something dhal-based like cumin, coriander and cardamom, or a chilli-based sauce of cayenne, cumin and paprika.
- Vegetables. Hard things that take a bit of cooking to soften up work best – root vegetables like carrots, parsnips, swede or beetroot, or celery and squash, cut into 2cm cubes. Softer things like peppers and courgettes tend to dissolve into the sauce, which does thicken it, but I like chunks of different colours, textures and flavours too. Green leafy things like spinach are best stirred through five minutes before serving so they keep their colour. You can also add more flavour with dried mushrooms or tomatoes; I make my own in my dehydrator. I also make dried courgettes, which don’t contribute much of anything apart from a way to use up courgettes.
- Protein. Black-eyed peas, pinto beans, marrowfat and carlin peas need soaking overnight first. Lentils, split peas and mung beans don’t. I’ve also tried adding almonds, which pair particularly well with green lentils.
- Carbohydrates. If you don’t want to cook a separate rice dish on the side you can do it all in one pot by adding cubes of potatoes or wholegrains like brown rice or (washed) quinoa. In my experience white rice tends to go a bit soft and dissolve cooked this way.
- Liquid. Stock, canned tomatoes or coconut milk all work well.
I just fry up the flavour components in a bit of oil, then add everything else, fast boil for twenty minutes and then put the pan in the haybox for around eight hours. The above method of dividing things into categories that each need to contribute at least one component, rather than a strict list of ingredients, is shamelessly stolen from Jack Monroe.
I have to confess that I started my haybox cooking experiments out of curiosity, in much the same way as I wanted to find out whether you could really bake potatoes in mud instead of using tinfoil for example (it turns out you can). I surprised myself however by finding how well preparing a stew in the morning before work to have a hot dinner afterwards actually made my day easier, instead of just being an interesting novelty. I am conscious however that not everyone’s mornings work this way, and it’s very easy for someone to patronisingly say “oh it’s just so easy” to someone who experiences difficulties that they don’t.
And this leads me to my concerns about sharing this post during a cost of living crisis – while yes, it can be a way to save fuel and hence money on cooking, there are currently far too many simple solutions being trotted out by people who assume the problems people struggling are facing are down to their own lack of initiative or intelligence. Just put on a jumper, put some foil behind your radiator, do starjumps and hug your pets, buy oats in bulk, switch to a budget supermarket, forage for weeds, assuming that people in poverty wouldn’t have considered these options and either be already doing them or have a solid reason why they can’t. Suggestions like this are effectively victim-blaming from people who need to convince themselves they’re too smart to fall into poverty to feel better about themselves.
“To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.”
Oscar Wilde
For example I’m lucky enough to be able to save money at the moment by buying pulses and grains in bulk, items that work very well in a haybox, but that’s not an option in many peoples’ living situations. In my third year at university I lived in a poorly maintained student house by the Thames and my housemates and I once got together with some friends who had a van to bulk buy food from the Suma warehouse. We got it home and every rat in West London immediately descended on our kitchen to eat everything they could and widdle on the rest. Bulk buying only works if you live somewhere dry and sanitary enough to keep the food, and where you can be sure no one you live with will steal it, and you also need to reserves of disposable income to spend £20 on rice in one go. All these factors are likely to be out of reach for the people who most desperately need to make their spending on food stretch furthest.
The truth is that money saving options are often least available to those who need them most, and this is a bug, not a feature, or the unequal society we live in. The cheapest accommodation is usually the worst insulated, and heated using prepayment meters which offer the most expensive tariffs. The next tier of marginalisation down, those living in traveller sites or not connected to the gas supply, are even worse off. Bank charges and interest rates on borrowing are most unfavourable for those whose finances are the most precarious.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
Terry Pratchett
Money and energy saving tips like making a haybox may sometimes be helpful to people struggling, but should never be our first response to a cost of living crisis that wasn’t the inevitable consequence of a pandemic and war in Europe as the Tories want us to believe, but instead of deliberate decisions to pursue Brexit, systematically underfund the public sector and ignore rising poverty and inequality. Helping people survive with less may be useful in the short term, but in the long term we need to be ensuring that they don’t have to. It is in our power to ensure that in one of the richest countries in the world are not going hungry, freezing in their homes and risking their health to save money. We shouldn’t just be helping people struggling, we should be trying to build a world where they don’t have to.
There comes a point when we need to stop just pulling people out of the river, and go upstream to find out who’s pushing them in.
Widely circulated on the internet, frequently attributed to Desmond Tutu although as far as I can tell there’s no evidence he actually said it
Investing in renewable energy provision and modernising Britain’s draughty, unhealthy housing stock are some obvious solutions to the energy crisis that would create jobs as well as improving the energy supply. We could impose a windfall tax on energy company profits as most of the rest of Europe is doing. We could change the renewable energy generation regulations so that community energy projects, on school or civic building rooftops, weren’t subject to the same regulatory regime as large energy companies and hence priced out of even getting started. We could create a nationalised energy company with the money we’ve handed out to shareholders of the privatised ones, and it seems that Labour is finally talking about doing so. Insulate Britain has landed on a rather curious way of getting publicity by apparently pissing off everyone who encounters its protest, but their fundamental demands to change the fact that British housing is the least energy efficient in Europe by insulating social housing, supporting the insulation of private housing and improving building standards are eminently sensible.
Insulation cooking on it’s own won’t do any of this, but I hope maybe a few people will find this post useful for staying a bit warmer and better fed than they would otherwise be.
Tangled Bank Foraging and Fibre Crafts 
This is the perfect post. Starting with a concrete eco-project (helpful, with both pros and cons) it segues to the position of the poor, and then back to insulation–an expanded view. Wonderful writing and thought,
LikeLike
Thank you! Has anyone ever told you you give great compliments? Because that’s exactly what I wanted people to get from my writing.
LikeLike