It’s a Girl

At seven-plus months of age, Delphine has been eating solid food for about a month. But solids — aka goop — are really still just a preview of coming attractions, not the feature film. She only eats goop once or twice a day, enthusiastically making a mess but not exactly concentrating on it with the focus she applies to breastfeeding. It’s an activity, kind of like rolling around on the floor or taking a bath.

Her parents, of course, are busy fretting about it. We might know how to feed ourselves reasonably well, but feeding a baby from a spoon can seem daunting. Is this food too thick? Too thin? Too chunky? Will it give her a rash? Allergies? Disease? Death?

Publishers, of course, are happy to help us confused parents out. There are entire cookbooks devoted to whipping up purées, cubes, soups, and other kid-friendly solids, such as Joachim and Christine Splichal’s cheffy Feeding Baby and Lisa Barnes’ more down-to-earth Cooking for Baby.

The best-known baby-food cookbook, Ruth Yaron’s Super Baby Food, is daunting in itself, making parents who can’t live up to its standards feel like failed hippies. As Matthew Amster-Burton pointed out in his book about raising a food-happy daughter, Hungry Monkey, Yaron’s classic is “the finger-wagging grandmother of all the make-your-own-baby-food books,” encouraging parents to exhaust themselves making a battery of dishes destined for their wee ones’ gullets and worrying about whether or not an organic vegetarian diet will really prevent their tots from catching colds.

What all the books have in common are three lists: good foods to start your baby on, potentially allergenic foods you should avoid until the kid is older, and recipes for making baby food.

I’m gonna blow their cover: The “recipes” are basically all some form of steaming and mashing, which most adults can figure out at home without the aid of a cookbook. (Instructions: Put pears in steamer. Steam. Scrape pear flesh from skins. Purée with some breastmilk or formula or water. Done.) Once the books get to the recipes for regular food, you can sell ‘em back to Powell’s. Because, heck, you can boil water and make pasta with butter and cheese any day; you don’t need a cookbook to tell you that your kid will probably like it just as much as you do.

Suggested first foods in these books are all the same: avocadoes, sweet potatoes, apples, pears, squash, peas, and the like. So are the allergenic foods: strawberries, egg whites, citrus, wheat, nuts, chocolate, shellfish — you know, things adults tend to be allergic to. There are a few outliers, such as honey (apparently it can harbor botulism, although I doubt a jar of superheated Sue Bee honey has this problem) and carrots, spinach, and beets (these can be high in nitrates and make your kid sick, especially when the baby is younger than six months old). But, basically, all the books say the same things, just with different pretty pictures of goop.

However, the cookbooks don’t really touch on the world of cereal. Some advocates tout rice cereal (uh, no, not Rice Krispies) as the ideal first solid food for babies, because it’s bland, soft, and nonallergenic. If you buy it preground in a box — instead of grinding your own brown rice in your hippie home — it comes fortified with iron, which babies older than six months need in their diets. Don’t like rice? You can also buy barley and oat and multigrain cereals, some of which come packed with multivitamins, too.

But, weirdly — despite the recommendations of Ellyn Satter in her classic book on feeding babies and toddlers, Child of Mine — none of these cereals, not even the multivitamin ones, are fortified with vitamin C. And babies need to take vitamin C along with iron in order to fully absorb the iron.

So. Delphine’s first foods were fruits and vegetables, but it sure is convenient to have a box of rice cereal around for those days when you don’t have anything handy to mash. (The nut-chopper attachment to our hand blender, actually, does all the mashing for us.) As we discovered, she will happily eat rice cereal mixed with breastmilk, although we think it tastes metallic and disgusting (presumably from the iron, not the candy-sweet milk). She prefers it, of course, when it’s mixed with something more fun, such as pears, and we, of course, tell ourselves that she’s getting more good stuff with the pears added in.

You might suggest adding citrus fruit, on the Captain Cook principle, but remember — no citrus allowed in that first year. Or at least so say the books.