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Some Kitchen Kinks: Baby
When the Baby is About a Month Old, barley water should be used instead of plain water. Put two tablespoonfuls of pearl barley in four cupfuls of cold water; boil an hour or more-down to two cupfuls; strain through a close cloth; add a pinch of salt and sweeten to breast-milk taste.
Add this to a cupful of "scalded" cow's milk treated as before described and begin feeding this strength.
Gradually use more milk and less barley water, until at about six months of age the child is getting two thirds milk and one third barley water.
Next to healthy breast milk, this will make as good food as the infant can get during teething and weaning.
Then comes the pure milk-always "scalded "-bread and milk, baked potato and milk, oatmeal porridgewhich can't be boiled too long, never less than two hours - and always eaten with milk, and the milk always "scalded," not boiled.
This is an infant formula, not a dish, and it belongs to a period before anyone understood what a baby actually requires. The preparation is straightforward; the feeding advice is the problem.
- Why this fails as infant foodDiluted cow's milk sweetened with sugar and thinned with barley water supplies almost no iron, far too little vitamin C, vitamin D and essential fatty acids, and a protein and mineral load that an infant kidney handles poorly. Babies fed on this pattern in the early twentieth century commonly developed rickets, scurvy and iron-deficiency anaemia. Infant feeding today follows breast milk or a commercially formulated product regulated for composition; nothing improvised should be substituted.
- "Scalded" is not pasteurisedThe author's insistence on scalding rather than boiling is an attempt at safety without a thermometer. Raw or under-heated cow's milk carries Salmonella, E. coli O157, Campylobacter, Listeria and historically bovine tuberculosis, and an infant is among the most vulnerable possible consumers. Heating milk until it steams at the edge of the pan does not reliably reach a pasteurising temperature or hold it.
- The sweetening instruction is unmeasurable"Sweeten to breast-milk taste" gives no quantity at all. Added sugar in an infant bottle has no defensible dose, and the recipe's whole strength schedule -- "begin feeding this strength", "gradually use more milk" -- is likewise left to the caregiver's judgement with no measurement to check against.
- Solids at the wrong time, in the wrong formBread and milk, baked potato and milk, and porridge as the food after weaning is a starch-dominated diet with no meat, egg, pulse, fruit or vegetable named. Current guidance introduces complementary foods around six months alongside breast milk or formula, with iron-rich foods early.
- Pearl barley and the two-hour porridgeFor the record, since the technique survives elsewhere: pearl barley is still sold under that name, and simmering four cups of water down to two takes roughly an hour on a low flame, as the recipe itself says. The direction that oatmeal "can't be boiled too long, never less than two hours" reflects the coarse-cut meal of the period, not modern rolled or steel-cut oats, which are done in ten to thirty minutes and turn to paste long before two hours.
- If you want barley water itselfBarley water strained, salted and served to adults as a drink is harmless and pleasant, hot or chilled with lemon. That is a different proposition from using it as the basis of a baby's diet. For infant feeding, use current medical guidance and a commercial formula.
Artificial infant feeding was one of the great anxieties of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and household encyclopaedias like this one felt obliged to address it because so many families had no doctor to ask. Cow's milk was known to disagree with young infants, and the standard response was dilution with a starchy "vehicle" -- barley water, oat water, rice water, or plain boiled water -- on the theory that thinning the curd made it digestible; the gradual shift from mostly barley water to mostly milk over six months echoes the percentage feeding schemes associated with the Boston physician Thomas Morgan Rotch, which dominated American paediatric advice from the 1890s. What none of these schemes could supply was what had not yet been discovered: the vitamins were not identified until the 1910s and 1920s, and infant mortality in the bottle-fed was several times that of the breast-fed, a gap only closed by pasteurisation laws, refrigeration and, eventually, formulas built to a measured specification. The passage is a fair record of the best lay advice of its moment and a clear illustration of how little that was worth.