Home › The Care of Babies › The Care of Babies: Barley
The Care of Babies: Barley
Barley Water. This is often used in diluting milk for infant feeding to make the curds of milk more easily digestible. Barley flour * is preferable to pearl barley. To make barley water use two tablespoonfuls of barley flour or meal, and a small pinch of salt, to a quart of cold water. First stir the barley flour with a little of the water into a thin paste. Then add the remainder of the water, stir and boil fifteen to twenty minutes. If pearl barley is used it must be thoroughly cooked. * Robinson's patent barley or the prepared barley of the Health Food Company are standard preparations of barley flour and can be obtained at almost any drug store. Place two tablespoonfuls in one quart of water and boil from two to three hours. Add more water from time to time so that the quantity in the end will be one quart. Strain through a clean piece of cheese cloth sterilized by baking in a hot oven. Barley water should not be kept from day to day, but should be made fresh every morning.
Barley water itself is an unremarkable grain drink, but this entry exists for one purpose — thinning cow's milk into a substitute for breast milk — and that purpose is why it cannot be followed. The notes below explain the problem rather than adapting the method.
- The hinge: this is an infant formula, not a beverage recipeThe whole point of the preparation is to dilute cow's milk for a baby. Diluted milk cut with a starch water supplies too little protein, fat, iron, vitamin C and vitamin D for an infant, in proportions no amount of careful boiling can fix. Anyone feeding an infant should use a commercially prepared formula or follow current medical advice, full stop.
- Water loadingThe recipe gives no proportion for mixing barley water with milk, and over-dilution is the hazard: excess plain fluid in place of milk can drop an infant's blood sodium and cause seizures. This is the specific mechanism behind modern warnings never to over-dilute infant feeds.
- Sterility the recipe cannot deliverThe instruction to bake cheesecloth in a hot oven and to discard the batch daily shows the author knew the risk, but a strained starch solution held at room temperature is a good growth medium. In this period the milk it was mixed with was frequently raw and often unrefrigerated, and infant diarrhoeal death rates in summer reflected exactly that.
- "Robinson's patent barley"A branded barley flour sold by chemists, long associated with Keen, Robinson & Co. of London. It was simply finely milled, kiln-dried barley; the drugstore shelf it sat on is a reminder that infant feeding was then a pharmacy category rather than a regulated food one.
- The two contradictory timingsThe main text says boil the flour fifteen to twenty minutes; the footnote says boil the prepared barley two to three hours with water replaced as it evaporates. The long boil belongs to whole or pearl barley, where the grain has to break down entirely; flour needs only long enough to gelatinise the starch.
- If you want barley water to drinkAs a plain adult beverage — barley simmered in water, strained, taken with lemon and a little sugar — it is perfectly ordinary and still made in Britain and across South and East Asia. That is a different use from the one described here.
Before manufactured formula, feeding an infant who could not be nursed meant modifying cow's milk at home, and the whole apparatus of "top milk," lime water, sugar solutions and cereal waters grew up around that problem. Barley and oat waters were favoured because their starch was believed to keep cow's-milk curds soft and finer in the stomach — the "more easily digestible" claim made here — an idea that ran through the percentage-feeding schemes taught in American paediatrics in the 1890s and 1900s. The branded barley flours sold at the drug counter mark the moment when commerce began taking the job over. Barley water itself is far older than any of this: it appears in classical medicine as ptisana, a thin invalid drink, and survived into the nineteenth-century sickroom as the standard mild nourishment for fevers.