During the nineteenth century, a new version of children’s
food emerged, one which applied the traditional mistrust of fresh fruit to the entire adult food supply. The new “nursery food” of the middle and upper classes was rooted in Victorian notions that children were almost a different species and must be kept physically and morally pure. Nursery food was part of a bigger shift in attitudes toward child care. Family historian Christina Hardyment has written of “the growing divorce between parent and child” from the 1870s onward, as parents started to trust the scientific advice of experts over their own instincts. In former generations, middle-class children were brought up in close proximity to their parents, but now they were pushed by nannies in prams, banished to the separate space of the nursery, and fed specialized “scientific” diets that would supposedly not upset their tiny stomachs.
Nursery food was seen as the moral option as well as a physical necessity. Medical experts took poor parents to task for their wrongs in failing to give children separate foods. Dr. Thomas Dutton proclaimed that one of the great “errors” in feeding children was giving them “food suitable only for adult people.” In Dutton’s experience, the “majority” of mothers were guilty of it, and then they wondered why their children were always ill: “‘What do you give your baby to eat?’ is a question often addressed. . . . ‘Oh! He eats the same as we do—a little potato and gravy, sucks a bit of meat, and sometimes has a drop of daddie’s beer.’ This is the way thousands of children are brought up.”
Nursery food, with its carefully calculated rations, was a reaction against the rambunctious free-for-all of family food. It aspired to apply rational science to the question of what children should eat for supper. Lying behind these plain, dull dishes—calf’s-foot jelly, bone soup—was an acute awareness of how vulnerable children were to disease and death. As one Victorian writer on digestion put it, the majority of “infantile diseases” arose from “improper food”; the implication was that giving children “proper food” could save lives.
When it arrived as a separate category in the nineteenth century, nursery food came with its own language. The foods that were spoken of approvingly in child-care manuals—many of them in the rice pudding family—were called
wholesome
,
rational
,
proper
,
safe
, and
digestible
. Certain things might
safely be given
or
may be admissible
. For example, “Cocoa, if not made too strong, is . . . quite admissible” for children, said one cookbook of 1874. Others were
unsuitable
,
objectionable
,
unfit
,
excessive
, or caused
biliousness
. As a rule of thumb, the most unsuitable foods were the ones that children most wanted to eat, the ones that were rich or sweet or extremely flavorsome (“highly seasoned”). Anything too stimulating in the way of sauces, it was feared, might bring on a bilious attack. Mushrooms, capers, rich tasty gravy, thick cream: none of these were recommended for children. The safest options in the nursery were plain and bland. In Victorian cookbooks, the section on children’s cookery, if there was one, usually came next to the one on invalids. Nursery food treated children as if they were permanently on the verge of nervous collapse.
Luther Emmet Holt was dubbed on the cover of his book as the “foremost authority on babies in America.” His best-selling guide to feeding children went through many editions after it was first published in 1894. Holt’s publishers boasted that hundreds of thousands of Americans had been raised on the book and were now using it as a guide to bring up their own children. Simple “ordinary” food is Holt’s mantra, with nothing too tempting to a child’s appetite. Running through all his advice is a stern conviction that what is good for adults is not good for children. “Many foods are useful for adults but too indigestible for children,” he warns.
“Stewed tomatoes,” for example, “may be given” to children, but only once they reach the age of seven or eight. It was those pesky seeds again. Holt believed in straining all vegetables until the child was three, and continuing to mash them with a fork until the age of seven or eight. Most omelets, likewise, were “objectionable” before the age of seven. Eggs should only be given if lightly coddled, poached, or boiled, never fried. Nor was Holt an advocate of rich and preserved meats, such as “ham, sausage, pork, liver, kidney, game and dried and salted meats and fish; all of these are best withheld until the child has passed the tenth year.” Still more dangerous was salad, which, being “somewhat difficult to digest,” should be avoided until the child was eleven.
Most dangerous of all in Holt’s book was any kind of pudding, pastry, or tart, especially those involving jams, syrups, nuts, and dried fruit. Some said that a little sweet stuff would do no harm, but Holt disagreed, because a little was “very apt soon to become a great deal.” The only kinds of desserts that Holt could put his faith in were “junket, plain rice, cornstarch or farina pudding without raisins, [and] baked custard.” A moderate portion of ice cream might be given once a week. Expressly forbidden, however, were “all fresh bread and rolls, buckwheat and other griddle cakes, waffles, all fresh sweet cake, especially if covered with icing and containing dried fruits. Lady fingers, plain cookies, ginger snaps are about as far as it is wise to go with children up to seven or eight years old.”
Holt was not alone in this fear of children eating fresh baked goods. It was often said by experts on nursery food that children must never be given fresh baker’s bread. The rationale—as with fresh fruit—was that it was both too tempting and too difficult to digest. Two-day-old bread was deemed safe, but if the bread contained currants it might be safer still to wait a full eight days. Ideally, it would be “staled” still further in the oven until it was crisp enough to give the teeth something to work on.
Nursery food came in two textures: very hard and very soft. On the one hand, most of the “safest” foods were the consistency of mush (“goodnight mush,” writes Margaret Wise Brown in her iconic 1947 storybook about nursery bedtime,
Goodnight Moon
). The idea was to make things soft enough that a child could eat them with a spoon. Oatmeal, bread
and milk mushed up in a bowl, and custard puddings were all admissible. Vegetables for children must always be stewed until they were so soft they could “pulp through a cullender,” as one expert said. Much sieving went on before a food could be reckoned harmless for a child’s delicate stomach. Meat should be pounded and not cooked too hard (in earlier times, nurses pre-chewed pieces of meat in their own mouths before offering them to a child). Cereals and grains must be cooked until they became a sticky gluey mass. Legumes such as peas, beans, and lentils were sometimes deemed valuable because of their high protein content, but only if they were boiled and thoroughly strained. And even then, there was a fear that they might not be easily “digested.”
Behind these two words “digestible” and “indigestible” lay a world of anxiety about a child’s toileting arrangements and what these might mean for the prospects of a child living or dying. Milk pudding was digestible; tomatoes were indigestible. Before the nineteenth century, it was considered healthy for substances to move freely around the body. In the premodern mindset of purgatives and leeches, diarrhea in children was not a cause for concern; many saw it as a sign that the body was correcting itself. By the 1890s, however, diarrhea and sickness were finally recognized as worrying symptoms in very young children, and a neurosis sprang up about any food that might be too “opening” in its effects. The fear of the consequences of gastric upset in children was well-founded, but it led the proponents of nursery food into the realm of paranoia about anything remotely fibrous.
In 1909, Dr. Eric Pritchard of England, a pediatrician who set up the first infant welfare clinic in London, expressed terror about the “intestinal trouble” that could result from allowing a child to eat marmalade, on account of the orange peel. He also warned in the strongest terms against spinach, which he noted, slightly surprisingly, was “a highly popular vegetable in the nursery.” It was Pritchard’s finding that “if the stools of children be examined after meals containing spinach, practically the whole of the spinach will be discovered in a completely undigested state.” Today’s baby-rearing books will sometimes warn, in slightly jocular terms, of what you may find in a child’s nappy after they have eaten sweet corn, but there is never any suggestion that the child will be harmed by it. For
the proponents of nursery food, though, there was peril to a child in any food that passed too quickly through the digestive tract.
All this nursery mush kept children in a state of constant babyhood. The endless sieved vegetables and slippery milk puddings were not dissimilar from the panadas and paps that formed a baby’s first solid food. At the same time, there was a view that children must be given plenty of very hard food—crisp stale toast and the like—in order that they might learn to exercise their jaws and teeth. Great emphasis was placed on mastication. The child whose food did not teach them to masticate was at risk of many “evils,” from stomach complaints to adenoids. Dr. J. Sim of the London Hospital noted that most problems of digestion arose from bad teeth; he said it was therefore very important to include plenty of “mouth-cleansing” foods in the child’s diet, such as crusts and toast and dry rusks. As with nursery food in general, the function of these jaw-exercising foods was to do the child good, rather than give pleasure.
The food writer Elizabeth David, who was born in 1913 to an upper-middle-class family, recalled the desperate boredom of nursery food in the 1920s. “We ate a lot of mutton and beef plainly cooked, with plain vegetables,” she remembered. There were “odious puddings” of ground rice or tapioca “invented apparently solely to torment children.” She “hated” the boiled watery vegetables she was given: “green turnip tops, spinach, Jerusalem artichokes, parsnips.” Everything that David was served in her nursery—devised by her mother “in league with Nanny”—was designed to be nourishing. She wasn’t expected to like “the obligatory mugs of milk.” That wasn’t the point of children’s food.
Looking back, it does seem an eccentric way to treat children: to feed them fare that no adult would countenance eating if they could avoid it. The Italian food writer Angelo Pellegrini complained about having to eat such “awful stuff ” as a boy: watery pieces of polenta dipped in “foul and evil-smelling” preserved pilchards (a kind of sardine). Pellegrini’s grandfather “sought to console [him] on such occasions” by telling him that he, too, had had to eat polenta and pilchards when he was a boy, and that it had been even worse for him, since the pilchards were hung on a string above the table and reused from meal to meal. During the nursery-school years, the awfulness of children’s food was something that
each generation had to endure—before making their own children suffer as they once had.
Perhaps there are still traces of the nursery food mentality around. In some families, the injunction to avoid salt in a child’s diet for the first year spills over into a generalized avoidance of flavor, as if a ten-month-old couldn’t handle the pungency of garlic or paprika. To dine with the parents of toddlers may entail a meal of boiled broccoli and plain roast chicken with no gravy, no salt or pepper, and everything separate. A surprising number of people—even those who themselves enjoy complex flavors—worry that no child will eat a plate of pasta unless it is simply dressed with plain butter. For the most part, though, when plain meals are doled out now, the reason is not to thwart a child’s appetite but to satisfy it.
The past fifty years or so have seen a near-total transformation in our definition of children’s food in the West, and increasingly elsewhere, too. The rice pudding years are far behind us. Once wartime scarcity was finally over, the food supply rapidly industrialized. An array of new convenience products aimed at children appeared on the shelves that bore little resemblance to the old family staples. Each decade after the war saw new innovations in the children’s food sector. Hot milk puddings gave way to cold sweetened yogurts in individual plastic tubs. Fish—as of 1953—came frozen and ready to cook as Day-Glo orange “fish sticks.” Pies segued into Pop-Tarts (launched in 1963), slabs of jam-filled pastry that a child could put into the toaster for herself after school. Potatoes were reinvented as waffles, and sweet waffles were jazzed up with chocolate chips. Whipped cream became squirtable. And then, so did cheese.
Whereas in the past, manufacturers aimed their messages at the parents who bought the groceries, they now found that there was money in aiming products directly at children. Somehow, a new generation of youngsters were able to manipulate their parents into buying them exactly the foods they desired, which were the ones they saw advertised on TV. The fact that many parents complied was a sign of how attitudes toward child-rearing had changed, with a shrugging off of old-fashioned wartime attitudes and rising numbers of women working outside the home. The new baby-care bible in Britain was
Baby and Child
by Penelope Leach,
first published in 1977. Leach believed—and it was a liberating attitude in many ways—that the answer to better parenting was “fun.” Dr. Spock had told parents not to keep fizzy drinks in the house, and had insisted that children should only snack on fruit. But Leach was relaxed about commercial snack foods. The “lowly potato crisp [chip],” she insisted, was “a surprisingly good source of vegetable protein.” In Leach’s view, it was unfair to say that snack foods were “all rubbish”: “A hot dog, for instance, is a nicely balanced item of diet. Dairy ice cream from a reputable manufacturer is an excellent food, and at least as good for your child as a homemade custard or milk pudding.” Leach thus absolved her readers of any pangs of remorse they might feel about buying the new convenience foods aimed at children rather than cooking them a homespun dinner from scratch.