Baby food in 12th c. England

[wiseheart]

I'm writing a Cadfael story, and one of my characters has just born a child some two weeks ago. She doesn't have enough milk to feed the baby, and neither is a suitable wet nurse to find. So, what would she give the baby? Cow milk? Some mashed vegetables

Comments

[clio75]

http://womenofhistory.blogspot.com/2008/05/medieval-baby-bottle.html

I googled "Artificial feeding baby medieval"

And it is quite possible for a woman to just not produce enough milk. It happened with my mother. I was simply starving. Later investigation showed that her breast tissue just hadn't devloped properly.

[germankitty]

This. I'm perfectly healthy, but had to start feeding formula to my son at 8 weeks because no matter how long I kept him at my breast, I just didn't have anymore to give. Turned out my hormones were in a hurry to resettle into pre-pregnancy mode -- I had my first light period six weeks after giving birth. *shrugs*

My midwife recommended drinking lots of whole milk and apricot juice to stimulate breast milk production, but even that only helped for a couple of weeks. (A friend of mine who nursed her daughter full time for nearly a year said that drinking "young", just-starting-to-ferment wine gave her a boost to almost directly-after-birth volumes, incidentally.)

In any case, as a crusader Cadfael would've been in contact with Arabs who at the time were the most advanced in overall medical knowledge; to a lesser extent, the Jews. I know too little about Cadfael (my husband's the fan), but if he can overcome religious prejudice those might be sources he could go to.

[wiseheart]

He wasn't big at prejudices, and it's a canon fact that he learned a lot from Arab healers during his years as a crusade. Thanks for the suggestion. :)

[criccieth]

i wonder whether there is a connection between the modern lifestyle, which produces years of periods, late start to childbirth and few and often spaced births and the "not enough milk" issue. a modern problem perhaps?

i agree with above - if i read that in a book and the mother was portrayed as healthy i'd find it very odd. there ARE books of childcare dating back centuries and they either seem to say "don't give even a tiny baby anything he cried for, beat him instead" or they argue for letting a breast-fed child have the nipple whenever he grumbles and then go on to say that nothing else wished for should be given - I've not heard of any discussing anything other than good feeding of the mother to encourage milk. Which might imply it wasn't thought of as an issue then.

or perhaps i'm completely wrong and dirt was only ONE of the reasons so many kids died back then - maybe many of them actually simply weren't getting enough milk.

[cheriola]

In Berlin during and shortly after the war my mother and her brother were raised on what's called "two-thirds-milk" over here. According to her (third generation pharmacist) it's been used for centuries if you didn't produce enough milk for your baby.

For a litre, you take 330 millilitres water and 20 g starch and cook that together for a few minutes. Then add 670 millilitres whole cow milk and 10 g sugar for taste. The idea is to lower the fat content of the cow milk and up the carb content of the mix to get it as close as possible to the composition of human milk. Considering the time frame, you'd have to substitute the starch with wheat flour (which will probably be easier to bind with the water if you prepare it as a roux first) or maybe oat grual. Traditionally beet sugar was used for sweetening, but as that's only been invented in the 17th or 18th century, you'd have to use honey instead.

[wiseheart]

Thank you for the suggestion, I'll keep it in mind for future usage.

[tanith_astlik]

Ditto the goat's milk after Fenugreek, though I'm not sure it would be necessary to sweeten the milk unless the baby finds it distasteful without. Milk generally comes in within the first week, after the colostrum. If the child hasn't starved to death by the second week and isn't too weak to nurse, then chances are the baby would be ravenous and go for the goat's milk without sweetener.

I don't know that you want to keep an infant going two weeks without food. Say, on the fourth day the lack of milk would be obvious. At some point the crying would be never ending until the infant ran out of energy and became to weak to cry.

[wiseheart]

Erm... it seems I wasn't accurate enough in the wording. Sorry. For the first two weeks, the baby ate normally, as it had a wet nurse. But the nurse died suddenly, and I needed a different way to feed the child after that.

The suggestions here were very helpful. I chose the fenugreek solution, arguing that Cadfael became familiar with it during his time as a crusader, and then the goat milk way, should it not be enough.

[criccieth]

ah! NOW I'm with you - so the natural mother's milk has pretty much started to dry up?

try searching for "breast-feeding help" and "re-starting nursing" or "restarting feeding". I gurantee you'll find some useful links. The natural mother re-starting feeding would be the most pracitcal solution because of the risks involved with giving a human baby anything else.

of course, she could always try to find a replacement wet-nurse. Ideally someone with a baby around her own infant's age (one of the few things superstitition about babies was actually right about - milk from a mother with an older child won't hurt the baby and will be better than alternatives but the mother's body makes the milk to meet the nutritional needs of her own infant and a 2 week old has different needs to say a six month old or even a one year old.