Q: But we said… we said we weren’t going to do horrible for a while!
A: Oh, pet, I know. It’s the fault of neither of us that the answer to nearly every question you ask about a Victorian child’s well-being leads to tragedy. Now buck up, because here we go.
A young doctor, who had recently become a father, told of the alarm he felt as he observed his nurse—the same beloved old lady who raised him from infancy—feeding his newborn child.
“Seriously, Ma, no matter how much I fuss, cut me off at six ounces. And if I’m wobbly, take my keys, too.”
Then, the pap she made for the infant, thick enough for the spoon to stand upright in, was to be forced into the tiny stomach, to prevent the wind getting in; and when it had been introduced in such unmerciful quantities as necessarily to occasion a degree of distention so uneasy as to throw the poor child almost into convulsions, more fuel was to be added to the flame because it was a case proved in her own mind, that wind had got in nevertheless, and that the child could cry for nothing but wind, and wind could come from nothing but emptiness; so that the more she kept stuffing, the more the child cried, and the more the child cried, the more she kept stuffing it.
The doctor interceded, respectfully, to stop his dear nursemaid’s good-hearted attempts to kill his child. When he tried to educate her about new ideas of what infants and small children should eat, she responded with great hostility.
“Don’t tell me, my dear young gentleman, of your halves, and your thirds, and your narrow stomachs, and small vessels; how should you men know anything about it? Didn’t I bring up you and your sister, and should have brought up all the whole eleven your mamma had, had they not turned out so sickly and fitty, that there was no rearing them any how.”
She spoke truly enough, for by all accounts, we were all sickly and fitty, and I verily believe, nothing but a very accidental strength of stomach, in the case of my sister and myself, prevented our going the way of the other nine; that is, being killed with kindness; stuffed, and crammed, and coddled out of this wicked world, almost as soon as we were born into it.
Q: Did you just tell me about the death of nine babies in the form of a folksy anecdote?
A: No… I just related it. There often appeared a very black humor in medical literature regarding infant mortality. When people have to cope with the un-copable, sometimes “whistling by the graveyard” humor is a comfort.
At any rate, a small child tends to eat only as much as they need, especially when their dietary options are so dull. If you follow the aforesaid rules, and remember never to force more on the child than needed, your child will thrive. Or at least survive. Maybe. Other foods were considered dangerous to children as well.
Q: It sounds like all the foods were dangerous.
A: Yes, but some were particularly depraved. Mostly the ones associated with happiness, unfortunately.
According to George Henry Rohe in 1890’s Text-Book of Hygiene, the “digestive derangements of children” include “nuts, candies, pies, fruit-cakes, and, above all, pickles.”
The last known picture of “Tinks” and “Cubby” Smythe, the notorious Pickle Thugs, before their nationwide crime spree ended in a four-day standoff with law enforcement.
Tasty foods are usually spiced. Spices, like nuts, are harvested in balmy pagan lands full of passion and partial nudity. Pickling (a much more common form of food preservation in centuries past) requires spices, as well as vinegar. Vinegar is nothing more than demon-alcohol gone putrid with a bacterial infection. These foods were thought to lead children, particularly girls, to behave erratically. Yet so many mothers were ignorant that they were sending their children down the path of Perdition on a dinner plate.
Says Newton Riddell, the author of 1902’s Child Culture According to the Laws of Physiological Psychology and Mental Suggestion, “The appetite for strong drink is often the result of the use of condiments, pastry, tea, coffee and tobacco. These things do not feed, but stimulate. They do not strengthen, but irritate. They set the appetite and passions on fire, thereby creating a demand for stronger stimulants.… Thousands of children have gone down into vice and crime propelled by appetites perverted by unwholesome food prepared by mother’s hand.” The deceivingly decent foods that will ruin your child are legion. Barker says “The flesh of immature animals—veal, lamb, &c—is unfit for children; so are all rich, coarse, indigestible things, as pork, goose, duck, fat and salted meats, which often give rise to sickness, spasm, looseness of the bowels, skin diseases, &c. Rich cakes, pastry, new or heavy bread, and sweetmeats [fruits and nuts preserved with sugar], are objectionable.”
Thurbers’ Fruit Preserves doesn’t even try to pretend your children won’t be driven to fevered brutality by its product.
Barker recommends children be given vegetables to stave off rickets, but only when boiled and salted to prevent worms. And he is particular about the vegetables, reminding the parent that “old, mealy potatoes, well-cooked, carefully washed, and free from lumps, are preferable to new.”
Fruit is also suspect. Barker warns us that “apricots, peaches, plums, damsons, cherries, &c, should, as a rule, be withheld.”
Louisa Caroline Tuthill, author of 1885’s Joy and Care, a Friendly Book for Young Mothers, agrees: “The indulgence in fruit of any kind should be limited while children are young,” she says. But the absolute worst (and this goes out to every modern parent who includes dried apricots from the bulk bins at the warehouse store in their child’s lunchbox as “dessert”) is the deadly influence of dried fruit.
Dried fruits can seldom be eaten with safety. Raisins are extremely indigestible; there is no stomach, unless it be that of the ostrich, that can master the skin of a raisin: we have known three instances of convulsions and death from the excessive use of this fruit. Dried cherries, apples and peaches, are altogether unfit to be received into the stomachs of children. Even the fig and the prune cannot be freely indulged in with entire safety.
Q: Fruit is bad? That can’t be… Weren’t figs and pomegranates and quince eaten all the time in the Bible? It seems like God is pro-fruit.
A: Don’t presume to know God’s stance on produce; it’s extremely arrogant. Mixing arrogant women, fruit, and God all into one story is what damned mankind to this kind of suffering and toil in the first place.
Q: What shall my child eat, then?
A: Here’s a good guideline. Before you feed your child anything, ask yourself: Is it a nice dried bread or cereal paste? If not, has it been boiled until it resembles a pot of wet washrags? Neither? Then it’s best for the child to avoid it.
Says Barker, “Throughout childhood none but the plainest food should be given.” Riddell elaborates that eating meat would inflame a child to evil. He points out that carnivorous beasts fed only vegetarian diets become docile. Which, granted, was likely due to severe protein deficiency slowing starving them to death. He suggests any child of an animal-like nature also be denied meat: “The child of a vicious or cruel nature should not be allowed any meat during its growing period; while those of a tame disposition, and especially the timid and diffident, may use meat once a day with good results. No doubt humanity would be much better off morally and spiritually, if all abstained from the use of meats.”
Q: Does it help with the child’s morality and spirit if I make an effort to give him only organic food?
A: Have… have you been feeding him inorganic food? Because if you have been—say, porridge made from metal shavings and feldspar chippings, say—I highly recommend you stop and, yes, go “organic.”
Q: Don’t be snippy. It’s an honest question.
A: I’m snippy because “organic” is an ill-used word that very few consumers even understand today. But if you are wanting to emulate Victorians, by all means feed your child from the overpriced, puny, and quickly rotting food aisle. In the Victorian era most food would have technically been grown “organically,” though without a Food and Drug Administration, much of it was adulterat
ed afterward. Still, modern pesticides or preservatives would have been absent. Just be sure, if you do decide to go organic, to pay attention to our chapter devoted to keeping a child healthy. Pesticides exist for a reason. That reason is anal worms.
Q: My child won’t eat this way! And I don’t really blame him. How do I persuade him to accept such a bland diet?
A: There are many ways to direct a child toward the healthful eating of repugnant food. Mrs. Tuthill favors exposure therapy, introducing the food to the child in much the same way one would gently lead an arachnophobe to accept that they will spend the rest of their lives locked in the dank cellar where only the hundreds of spiders they share their space with will hear their screams.
Waywardness should not be yielded to. Let the eye of the child become familiarized to the food, and it will gradually lose its annoying power. The next step is to accustom the nose to bear its effluvium without repugnance: the stomach is much influenced by the eye and the nose. The taste is next to be reconciled. This is best done at a time when the child is strongly tempted to eat, by hunger.
Tuthill’s language choice says a lot about the food of the day. “Annoying, effluvium, repugnance, reconciled.” She knows it’s gross. Just like we all know strained pees, tofu spinach scrambles, and eggplant casseroles are disgusting to a child. But it turns out good-tasting food is for sinners. So what are you going to do? Give the child all the nuts and pickles he wants and then spend the rest of your life scheduling activities around his parole hearings?
The nineteenth century was very in touch with the difficulties children faced, and frequently tried to address them in children’s literature. Take the story “Augustus Who Would Not Have Any Soup,” again from the brilliant Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter storybook.
The third day comes. O what a sin!
To make himself so pale and thin.
Yet, when the soup is put on table,
He screams, as loud as he is able
“Not any soup for me, I say!
O take the nasty soup away!
I won’t have any soup to-day!”
Look at him, now the fourth day’s come!
He scarce outweighs a sugar-plum;
He’s like a little bit of thread;
And on the fifth day he was—dead.
And… that’s pretty much that. A theme we will revisit often in this book: There is no kindness in mollycoddling a child. Eat your soup or we’ll be using it to adorn your tiny grave.
A child’s pickiness when presented with the few foods that were both plentiful before the era of mass agriculture and non-deranging might be one of the reasons Victorian health advocates put emphasis on health-improving beverages. It may be awful. But at least in liquid form it slides down faster. Of course, choosing the right beverage for your child is in itself a minefield.
“You can come out when you’ve finished your soup, Gus.”
Q: What shall my child drink? Besides the donkey… stuff you keep bringing up.
A: First, it’s a mistake to let your child just have a drink whenever they’re thirsty. It leads to drinking. Which makes sense. But drinking, see, in turn leads to drinking, as in grown-up booze guzzling.
Take it from Dame Henrietta Barnett in 1894’s The Making of the Body:
Some people are always wanting “something to drink,” and these like to take liquid in some form, not only at meals, but at all hours. This is not a good habit, and one that should not be encouraged; for at first children only ask for water, but in later life they want beer, and too easily turn into the public-houses for a drink, to the ruin of their own health and the destruction of the happiness of those who love them or depend upon them.
So proceed with caution, and most certainly avoid “soft-drinks” (nonalcoholic but still festive in nature, like lemonade, sarsaparilla, or fresh fruit punch), which teach a child to associate pleasure with hydration. Because before you know it, they’ll be dancing for pennies while gunslingers fire pistols at their feet just so they can afford a single shot a of gasoline-grade whiskey. As Barker warns:
The great danger of engendering in childhood, a habit that may culminate in the drunkard of after years, is too serious and imminent to be passed over. Who can say that the mere taste of wine or spirits with which a child is ceremoniously indulged on occasions as a “harmless luxury” shall not beget a fondness, that growing with his or her growth, will develop into the insatiable craving that inevitably makes the hopeless, loathsome sot?
A healthy child needs only clean water and fresh milk. An underweight child, however, must be plied with many fortifying and horrific “beverages.” One of the most popular drinks for thin or sickly children was “toast-water.” And if you’re picturing that time you tripped over the dog and dropped a slice of bread in her water bowl, where it dissolved into something more disgusting than anything she’s ever left in a tightly coiled pile on your lawn, you’re on the right track!
Toast-water is simple and health-restorative, and Barker gives us an easy recipe.
Toast thoroughly, but not to a cinder, half a slice of a loaf, of the usual size and of a day or two old, put it into a jug, and pour over it a quart of water which has been boiled and cooled; and, after two hours, pour off the water gently from the bread. A small piece of orange or of lemon-peel, put into the jug at the same time as the bread, is a great improvement to toast-water.
For Barker, the beauty of toast is that it brings taste (as it was defined by nineteenth-century standards) and color to water without affecting its purity (which it seldom contained anyway). He did not consider that this particular flavor burst of soggy bread may not have been as enticing as hoped. But it was worth it if it brought down fever: “Toast-water may be used at will in every febrile affection. It diminishes the heat of the mouth, the throat, and the stomach; and, by sympathy, that of the whole body.”
Well, that’s not how fevers work, and wet toast is not generally considered an antipyretic (fever reducer). But I imagine there were many times just the mention of toast-water was enough to give children the chills.
If your child is very young, or very ill, it’s best to skip the toast-water and go straight to the ass milk I mentioned above. Ass milk is the unchallenged champion of restorative drafts.
Q: STOP saying… Ugh! Just… are there any fortifying beverages I might give my child that involve neither soggy toast nor squeezing any animal’s nipples?
A: That high-and-mighty “I’m too good to milk a donkey” attitude will infect your child as surely as disease, madam. Nonetheless, you are in luck. There are many forgotten beverages of the nineteenth century that offer health benefits to children and adults.
Apple Tea—This is not apple juice or cider, both of which contain too much sugar and have been known to lead to sexual curiosity. Rather, apple tea is made by pouring boiling water over sliced apples, cooling the water, and then giving the child the not noticeably altered water and telling them how fortunate they are that it doesn’t have toast in it.
Orgeat—Today orgeat is used as a drink mixer. In the Victorian era it had more important applications. “Blanch two ounces of sweet almonds, and four bitter almonds. Beat to a paste, and rub into milky water. Is a good treatment for upset stomach and heartburn, though some children might develop a strong rash from use.”
There may or may not be a connection between the rash mentioned in that recipe and the one often caused by prussic acid, or as we in the twenty-first century call it, cyanide, which is contained in bitter almonds. Bitter almonds grow wild, look extremely similar to the common “sweet” almond, yet contain fifty times more cyanide. Depending on the concentration of cyanide in the nuts, the size of the person eating them, and how fast they are ingested, even a small handful can be instantly fatal. So, yeah, be careful with that.
Botanical drawing of the sweet almond tree. Which looks just like the deadly bitter almond tree. So choose wisely, and may the odds be ever in your favor.
Mustard-whey—T
ake half an ounce of bruised mustard seeds and one pint of milk and boil them together until the milk is curdled.
Drinking the nonlumpy bits of your mustard milk is thought to help ease dropsy by stimulating your kidneys to help you pee. However, it might be wise to remember that today we call dropsy “edema” and it can signify severe organ failure. So if the mustard doesn’t work, off you go to the emergency room, okay?
Rennet-whey—“Infuse a moderate-sized piece of rennet [scrapings from inside a cow’s stomach] in a sufficient quantity of boiling water… stir a table-spoonful of it into three pints of milk; cover up the mixture with a clean cloth, and place it before the fire until it forms a uniform curd.”
Then squeeze the curd until the juice (whey) comes out. What you end up with is basically… very fresh cheese-water. It will help a child with their… Pshh. Between you and me, it’ll help them never again complain of whatever ailment made you force cheese juice down their throats.
Marsh-mallow Tea—Oh, now here we have something delightful-sounding that the little ones might actually… Wait. No. I’m sorry.
Before marshmallows were mass-produced sugar puffballs, they were just the dirty, cancerous-looking dried root of the Althaea officinalis plant: thick, tough, and fibrous. Eventually French chefs would make a nice meringue sweet that may or may not have had Althaea root extract, and the marshmallow as it should be would be born. Until then, you’re stuck with the old marsh-mallows, which, when boiled, make a tea that helps keep the kidneys from “gravelling” (producing kidney stones).
The marsh-mallow. Complete with its own roasting stick.
Q: I just realized we’ve not yet touched on drunk babies in this chapter, even though we’re discussing drinks. Are we done with drunk babies?
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