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Soup for Children, Liebig's
This preparation, which is hardly entitled to the name of soup, as the word is generally understood in this country, is made in the following manner. Take one ounce (one large table-spoonful) of seconds flour, and mix it smoothly and carefully with ten ounces of cold skimmed milk until the whole is smooth; add seven and a half grains of bicarbonate of potash dissolved in a tea-spoonful of water (if sixty grains of the potash be dissolved in one ounce of water, one tea-spoonful must be used at a time), and then heat it gently till it reaches the boiling point, and keep it boiling for five minutes. Stir the preparation well whilst it is being heated; add to the whole one ounce (one large dessert-spoonful) of malt flour (malt ground in a coffee-mill, and sieved) mixed with two ounces of water, and stir it well. Cover the pan, and let it stand for half an hour in water which is nearly boiling, so as to keep the soup warm; then strain through a fine sieve, and bottle it. This quantity is enough for a day's supply for a child under two years of age. A quart of milk should be added to the soup.
This is not a soup in any ordinary sense — it is a nineteenth-century artificial infant food, intended as the whole day's nourishment for a child under two. The notes below explain the units and why the preparation should not be attempted.
- Why not to make itThe recipe is a homemade infant formula offered as a sole food source. Nothing in it supplies vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin A or usable iron in adequate amounts, and the protein and mineral balance is nowhere near what an infant requires. Feeding it as directed risks scurvy, rickets and failure to thrive — which is precisely what happened to babies raised on foods of this class.
- The potash doseSeven and a half grains is about 0.49 g of potassium bicarbonate, added to a single day's feed for a small child. Grain measures were dispensed on apothecary scales that no kitchen has; an error of one spoonful of the stock solution multiplies the dose. The potassium and alkali load is not something to guess at for an infant.
- The quart of raw milkThe added quart of milk -- The final instruction adds a quart of milk to the soup without saying that it should be heated. Milk of the period was generally unpasteurised, and bovine tuberculosis and other milk-borne infections were a genuine risk; infant diarrhoeal disease was among the leading causes of death in the first year of life.
- The half-hour holdCovering the pan and standing it in near-boiling water for thirty minutes is intended to let the malt's diastase convert the starch to sugar, though at that temperature much of the enzyme would be destroyed.
- What the malt flour was forGround malt supplies diastase (amylase), which breaks the flour's starch into maltose and dextrin so a baby could digest it. Because the enzyme is destroyed by boiling, the malt is stirred in after the five-minute boil — that is the mechanical logic of the recipe, and the only part of it that is sound.
- Seconds flourA lower grade of wheat flour from the second milling, coarser and darker than the best white flour and cheaper. It has no modern shelf equivalent; the nearest thing is a soft, lightly sifted wheat flour.
- If you need thisA current commercial infant formula, prepared to the manufacturer's directions, should be used. Historical formula recipes are worth reading and not worth reconstructing.
This is Justus von Liebig's Suppe f r Säuglinge, published by the German chemist in the 1860s and widely reprinted in English household books for the rest of the century. Liebig, whose name also attaches to the meat extract, approached infant feeding as a problem in analysis: he compared the composition of cow's milk with human milk, decided the difference lay chiefly in the carbohydrate and the mineral salts, and designed a wheat-and-malt preparation with added alkali to close the gap. The malt was the clever part — using diastase to pre-digest starch borrowed a technique already familiar from brewing, and the principle survives in malted infant cereals. What Liebig could not know was that milk carries more than protein and sugar; the vitamins were not identified until the twentieth century, and neither he nor his imitators understood that a chemically 'complete' food could still starve a child. The commercial soluble version sold as Liebig's Food for Infants was among the first manufactured formulas, and its appearance in a general cookery dictionary shows how far the middle-class household had come to treat infant feeding as a matter for the kitchen scales rather than the wet nurse.