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The Care of Babies: Strain
A prominent physician of northern Illinois, who has been practicing for thirty-two years, says: "My food for babies is invariably one heaping tablespoonful of pearl (store) barley, ground in a coffee-mill, and boiled in one quart of water, down to a pint. Strain, add the same quantity of milk, and let the baby have it.
Hundreds of mothers have used this preparation on my direction, and the result has been healthy, growing, fat babies. I think that Professor Jacobi recommended this many years ago. At any rate I always use it, and with constant success."
This is not a dish but a substitute for breast milk, and it is the one category of old recipe that no amount of conversion can rescue. It is printed here as a document of turn-of-the-century infant feeding, not as instructions.
- Why it fails as an infant foodBarley water diluted with an equal volume of milk supplies almost no iron, vitamin C, vitamin D or usable fat profile for a growing infant. Fed as the sole diet it produces exactly the plump appearance the doctor praises while leaving the child anaemic and rickets-prone; "fat babies" was the visible endpoint physicians of the period had, and it was a poor one.
- Unmodified cow's milkWhole cow's milk is not recommended as a drink before twelve months. Its protein and mineral load stresses immature kidneys and it is associated with occult intestinal blood loss and iron deficiency in infants. The 50 percent dilution here reduces that load, but it also lowers the energy density of the feed well below what an infant needs.
- The milk in 1900 was rawThe milk was raw -- Nothing in the method heats the milk. Pasteurisation was not general in American cities when this was written, and urban milk supplies carried bovine tuberculosis, brucellosis, typhoid and streptococcal infection. Summer diarrhoea from contaminated milk was a leading cause of infant death in this period.
- No quantity, no scheduleThe recipe gives no feeding volume, no interval and no adjustment for the baby's age or weight. Over-dilute feeds given in quantity can cause hyponatraemia and water intoxication in infants, which is a medical emergency.
- What the archaic terms mean"Pearl (store) barley" appears to mean ordinary shop-bought pearl barley rather than a prepared or patent barley flour; the coffee-mill served here as the grain grinder. Reduced from a quart to a pint, this yields roughly one pint of barley water and, after the milk, about a quart of finished feed.
- If you need an infant feedUse current guidance from a paediatrician and a commercially prepared infant formula. Homemade formulas, including modern internet versions, have caused documented cases of severe electrolyte disturbance and nutritional deficiency.
The "Professor Jacobi" invoked here is almost certainly Abraham Jacobi (1830-1919), the German-born New York physician generally regarded as the founder of American pediatrics, who wrote extensively on artificial feeding and did promote barley- and cereal-water dilutions of cow's milk. His reasoning was of its time: infants fed straight cow's milk formed hard curds and suffered badly, and a starchy decoction was thought to make the milk more digestible, while boiling the barley water incidentally sterilised at least half of the mixture. Barley water itself is far older than pediatrics, a standing invalid drink in English and American households for centuries. The confident tone of this entry, thirty-two years of practice and hundreds of mothers, is characteristic of household compendia around 1900, which collected medical opinion as testimony rather than evidence; it was written before infant mortality statistics, milk certification and the study of vitamins rewrote the whole subject.