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Despite being the latest buzzword on the lips of celebrity chefs, slow cooking is far from being a trendy, new phenomenon. Cooking food slowly has been around for as long as we, and our ability to create fire, have. The first stories of humans using fire seem to indicate cooking in large fire pits, where whole animal carcasses would be buried in the midst of slow-burning coals and cooked for 24 hours or more. Stories of similar cooking methods are recounted, and still employed in Australia, by Aboriginal tribes and apparently also in parts of India.

In the late eighteenth century the English scientist Benjamin Thompson is reported to have left a joint of meat in a drying oven overnight, only to be amazed when, the next morning, he found that the meat was tender and fully cooked, although it hadn’t browned. He was totally at a loss to explain why this had happened.

Much later, in 1969, Thompson’s experiment was repeated by Professor Nicholas Kurti from the University of Oxford during a lecture at the Royal Institution. He showed that the temperature of the meat in Thompson’s trial did not go higher than 70°C (158°F), far lower than the temperature at which most of us roast meat, around 200°C (400°F).

In the world wars cooking was frequently done in straw boxes where stews and similar foods were heated over a fire to boiling point and then left encased in a box filled with straw or hay. The food went on cooking, slowly but surely. Wool, feathers, cotton, rice hulls and more recently cardboard, aluminium foil, newspaper, fibreglass, fur and rigid foam have also been documented as good insulators in similar methods now used predominantly by serious campers and explorers.

For many years, Orthodox Jews have been making cholent (meaning ‘hot food’ in Hebrew), a stew simmered over a very low flame or in a slow oven for many hours (up to 24 hours or more) and served on Shabbat (the Sabbath). In some instances the uncooked cholent was brought to the local baker before sunset on Fridays and he would put the mixture in his oven, which he always kept fired, and families would come by to pick up their baked cholent the next morning.