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The Care of Babies: Whey
Whey.-Warm one pint of milk to blood heat and add one teaspoonful of essence of pepsin or one junket tablet. Let stand until it jellies, then break up the curds with a fork and strain through muslin. Whey is sometimes used to advantage when the baby cannot digest cow's milk.
Solid Foods. The cutting of the eighth incisor or front teeth, which occurs usually during the twelfth month, may be taken as nature's indication that the child requires other food than milk. At this time if the infant is well and strong, a little stale bread, at least one day old, may be given with fresh milk in place of one of the regular feedings.
This may soon be supplemented by a small quantity of well cooked hominy, oatmeal or cornmeal mush. But keep in mind constantly the fact that milk is the most important article of the diet, and that these foods are merely supplementary. Do not feed the baby any of the ready-cooked or pre-digested breakfast foods. Buy the natural cereals and cook them at home. Cereals should be cooked at least three hours in a double boiler, or preferably over night in a fireless cooker. They should be strained through cheese cloth or muslin.
If the above foods are taken without difficulty and no bad results are observed, give stale bread liberally buttered. This satisfies the infant's desire for solid food and also affords an easily digested and nourishing form of fat.
At fifteen months, a soft boiled egg may be given as the noon feeding.
About the middle of the second year, or when sixteen teeth have developed, other and more solid foods may be given. But throughout the entire period of infancy, food other than milk should be selected and prepared with the greatest care and given in moderation. During the second year children are almost invariably overfed.
Diet of Older Children. - Between one and a half and two and a half years of age a child may have bread and butter, orange, potatoes and certain other vegetables, certain fruits and certain meats. The bread should be at least one day old and may include toast, zwieback, graham, oatmeal and gluten crackers. Porridge may be oatmeal, rice (cooked three hours), hominy (cooked six hours), farina (cooked one hour), cornmeal (cooked two hours), barley meal or wheaten grits. All should be thoroughly cooked for the time stated, or over night in a fireless cooker.
Strain through cheese cloth or muslin and serve with certified or pasteurized milk. The meat may be rare roast beef, fresh cooked mutton or chicken. All should be finely minced.
The vegetables may be well cooked spinach or potato. The latter should be fed in small quantities, freshly baked and lightly broken up and salted. Potato is a starchy food and hard for an infant to digest. It is much more wholesome baked than boiled. The fruit may be ripe apples (better baked), grapes, freed from the stones and skins, stewed prunes and orange pulp, freed from the fibrous portion. Fruit should be given in great moderation, if at all, in summer. Other suitable foods are baked custards or junket.
A piece of rare roast beef to suck, bread with dish gravy (not the heavy thickened and highly seasoned gravy) and soft boiled or poached eggs may form additions to the dietary which may be extended gradually to meet developments as the baby grows into childhood. But either for an infant or a child, overfeeding is far more injurious than underfeeding.
Improper Foods. - Hundreds of infants have been killed by the mistakes of parents in giving them other THE CARE OF BABIES and improper foods. Never feed the baby at the table from the food prepared for other members of the family. The table foods may be poisonous to the infant. Never give a child under two years of age ham, bacon, or pork in any other form; cabbage, pickles or other succulent vegetables; coffee, tea, beer, wine, cider or any other alcoholic liquor of any kind; bananas, berries or other fruit except orange juice or pulp, prune juice and stewed or baked apple. Do not give pie or pastry, nuts, cake, candy, ice cream, or any other kind of sweets. Above all never dope your baby with drugs, nostrums, or patent foods of any kind, relying upon the statements of unprincipled manufacturers, druggists or other venders, or those who have "tried and can recommend them." Such advice is often as ignorant as it is well intended. The kind of medicine or food preparation which may agree with your neighbor's baby may totally disagree with yours.
Don't experiment with your baby. If you think it needs medicine or a change of food consult a competent physician to find out what is the matter. Then be guided implicitly by his advice.
The whey at the head of this passage is a genuine recipe, but it is a recipe for feeding an infant, and it fails on both microbiological and nutritional grounds. The notes below explain the specific problems rather than adapting the method.
- The milk is never heated to a safe temperature"Blood heat" is roughly 98F, and the mixture is then held warm until it sets. That is not pasteurization; it is close to the optimum incubation range for Salmonella, Listeria and E. coli O157. Much household milk in this period was raw, and the method requires the milk to be warm rather than boiled -- though rennet acts perfectly well in milk that has been pasteurized and then cooled to blood heat.
- Infants are the highest-risk groupBacterial loads that an adult would shrug off cause severe illness in babies under a year, including haemolytic uraemic syndrome from Shiga-toxin E. coli and invasive listeriosis. Straining through muslin removes curd, not organisms, and the cloth itself is a reservoir unless boiled.
- Whey is not a food an infant can live onSeparating the curd removes most of the casein and nearly all the fat. What is left is water, lactose, whey protein and salts, at a fraction of the calories of milk. Used in place of feedings, it will underfeed a growing child.
- "Cannot digest cow's milk" is a diagnosis, not a kitchen problemA baby vomiting or failing to gain on cow's milk may have a milk protein allergy, lactose intolerance, reflux or something unrelated. Whey still contains beta-lactoglobulin and all of the lactose, so it does not solve the two commonest causes. This is a matter for a paediatrician and a proper formula.
- Essence of pepsin and junket tabletsEssence of pepsin was a pharmacy preparation of gastric enzyme, usually in glycerine and dilute acid, and is no longer sold for domestic use. Junket tablets are rennet, and are still sold for adult desserts; neither ingredient is the problem here, the temperature and the intended eater are.
- The rest of the passage is superseded, not merely old-fashionedCurrent guidance introduces solids around six months rather than at the eighth incisor, does not require cereals to be boiled for three to six hours and strained through cloth, and does not treat butter-laden stale bread as a staple. Rare roast beef and "a piece of rare roast beef to suck" for a two-year-old carry the same pathogen problem as the raw milk.
- If you want to make whey for cookingWhey for baking or ricotta-style work is a normal kitchen product and is made from pasteurized milk in the ordinary way. Use a current recipe, and never a recipe intended for infant feeding.
Whey feeding belongs to a specific moment in American paediatrics. Between roughly 1890 and 1915, infant nutrition was dominated by "percentage feeding" — the practice, associated above all with the Boston physician Thomas Morgan Rotch, of taking cow's milk apart into fat, sugar and protein and reassembling it in proportions thought to suit the individual baby. Whey, cream mixtures, barley water and top milk were the working materials of that system, and a household manual of this kind passed its simplest operations on to mothers who had no access to a milk laboratory. The insistence on "certified or pasteurized" milk elsewhere in the same passage is a marker of the period too: the certified milk movement and the first municipal pasteurization campaigns were then new, and the author's repeated warnings against patent foods, drugs, nostrums and neighbourly advice reflect a real epidemic of infant deaths from adulterated milk and opiate-laced nostrums. The nutritional reasoning here has been entirely replaced, but the underlying anxiety — that the wrong food will kill the baby — was well founded.