3. Food and birth

In 1767, while his wife was heavily pregnant, the Surrey schoolmaster and clergyman William Ramsden wrote to Elizabeth Shackleton in Lancashire, informing her that ‘her Nursery engages every moment and I fear will do so a good deal longer. Not that she intends to give Caudle until after Christmas if I am rightly informed.’1 His use of the phrase ‘giving caudle’ to refer to the processes of birthing indicates the extent to which food and drink were entwined with this moment of the life cycle. A thickened drink regularly given to both the birthing woman and her attendants in the birthing chamber, caudle symbolized birthing in a very particular way. Its consumption formed part of several dietary expectations around birthing in the eighteenth century, the observance of which was used to measure and communicate the health, progress and recovery of both the new mother and her infant to family, friends and neighbours. Food and drink could convey important messages about the emotional bonds between mother and infant, and about society’s expectations of maternal attachment and sacrifice. Food also had a medicinal function and was used to prevent and treat common postpartum complaints based on understandings of bodily balance and moderation. Within the framework of this book’s broader construction of birthing, this chapter will show that food and drink were central elements that have been hitherto overlooked in both the management and the experience of birthing.

This chapter examines a selection of twenty-two manuscript recipe collections that date from c.1650 to c.1831. Each of the collections has been attributed to female authors, and all include some mention of childbirth or birth-related complaints. The attribution of these collections, however, requires caution. As with all forms of life-writing, manuscript recipe books are deceptively intimate, offering tantalizing glimpses into the households of their writers through their favourite recipes or the medical complaints they sought to remedy. Sara Pennell’s work on personal recipe books has highlighted the numerous and diverse motivations for keeping notes of recipes, beyond the simple intention to use them.2 These range from handwriting practice to a demonstration of marriageability and therefore serve as a reminder that the collection of a recipe is evidence of neither utility nor practice. Michelle diMeo’s work on the notebook attributed to Katherine Ranelagh emphasizes the difficulties not only of identifying the author of a collection but also of accurately dating it, given that many manuscript books span long time periods and contain several different hands.3 Nor should it be assumed that each hand was female. While recipe books have been associated with female domestic cultures, Elaine Leong has shown that men were heavily involved in the acquisition and curation of recipe collections.4 Despite these methodological difficulties, however, manuscript recipe books remain important sources of information about personal networks, knowledge and both medical and culinary skills within some English households. Even omissions of entry can provide information about household expertise and its oral transmission. Leong’s scholarship has shown that recipe collections reflected family experiences of illness, both actual and anticipated. Moreover, she situates the collection of recipes and remedies within a constant process of assessment and testing before they were assimilated into the collection. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising to note a stark difference between the information recorded in manuscript collections and the recommendations made in published midwifery texts. If recipe collections responded to the needs and expectations of a household, there was little need to write down a rich and well-established tradition of food and drink that focused on the birthing chamber. Manuscript recipe collections do not generally include descriptions of birthing practices because knowledge of such practices was acquired through artisanal methods: touch, apprenticeship and personal experience.5

The other key source examined in this chapter – collections of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century folklorists – offers unprecedented insights into customs around food and drink that were central to the process of giving birth. In documenting what they saw as declining customary practices, the authors of these collections of folklore offer a partial solution to the methodological difficulties presented by the strongly oral traditions of birthing. They are highly personalized documents, the contents of which are dependent on the religious, moral and personal agendas of their collectors. The earliest collection referred to in this book, the Anglican curate Henry Bourne’s Antiquitates Vulgares of 1725, was written to warn of the dangers of what he believed was ungodly ‘folly and superstition’.6 The other key eighteenth-century collection, John Brand’s Observations on Popular Antiquities, published in 1777, built on Bourne’s Antiquitates but with a greater sense of nostalgia. While Brand also condemned what he saw as ‘papist’ fascination with ‘heathen’ practices, he considered his volume as ‘a union of Endeavours to rescue many of these Causes from Oblivion’.7 The popularity of folklore as a field of study expanded rapidly in the nineteenth century, leading to a proliferation of publications on customary practices. Most of these nineteenth-century compendia were compiled with the explicit intention of recording customs that were thought to be under threat from processes of modernization. The veracity of the traditions recorded in these collections therefore relied on a variety of factors: the collector’s motivation for compiling the collection, the relationship between the practitioner of the tradition and the collector, and contemporary notions of respectability. Despite being highly curated, however, it is possible to identify strong threads of continuity in different folklorists’ accounts of customary birthing practices. In many cases, the details of the custom change between accounts but the core practice remains identifiable. Where this thread of continuity can be identified across folklore collections, it mitigates some of the methodological difficulties of this source group. Folklore collections have thus been invaluable in the preservation of these robust cultural practices. By studying folklore collections in conjunction with manuscript recipe books and the published works of accoucheurs, this chapter offers a detailed account of how food and drink were used to manage the processes of giving birth in the eighteenth century.

Food was an important form of medicine in the eighteenth century, when attitudes to the reinstatement and preservation of good health following a birth remained firmly rooted in the humoral theory espoused by Hippocrates and Galen.8 Humoral ways of understanding medicine were challenged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the development of chemical and mechanical medicine. Historiographically, the shift in systems of medical belief has been considered progressive, but recent research has demonstrated the tenacity of humoral ways of conceptualizing the body throughout the eighteenth century.9 Individuals, E. C. Spary has shown, oscillated between different models of the ‘healthy body’ and borrowing both language and treatment from the various different bodily schema in circulation.10 Food and drink were thought to have a mutually defining relationship, with the body making humoral understandings of physiology difficult to displace. What one ate and drank dictated not only bodily health but also personality and temperament. This relationship between food and the individual was interdependent, as bodily health and personality also dictated what one ate and drank.11

By the second half of the eighteenth century, the humoral body – composed of four humours and governed by flux and flow – was no longer the dominant way of conceptualizing human physiology. Yet humoral language continued to be employed throughout the period. Humoral physiology held that female bodies had cold and moist properties, in contrast to male bodies, which were hot and dry in constitution. The inherent moisture of female bodies was evidenced through menstruation, which was thought to be the body expelling plethoric humours.12 This excess moisture was necessary to nourish the infant during pregnancy. Without it, the child would take the vitality, and eventually the life, of the mother during parturition.13 Age, as well as gender, was thought to dictate the body’s humoral constitution, with infants being born humid and moist but experiencing a gradual and lifelong process of drying out. Hannah Newton has effectively demonstrated that infants were considered humorally distinct, and that this knowledge was widely acknowledged across social class.14 By the end of the eighteenth century, the language of ‘humours’ had given way to that of ‘nature’ and ‘regimen’, though the unpinning theories of moderation and balance remained prominent. Throughout pregnancy and birthing, both mother and child were regarded as physiologically imbalanced. Mother and child therefore required careful treatment throughout the process of birthing to assist nature in restoring their health following the ordeal of giving birth. Restoring balance, and therefore health, to both mother’s and infant’s bodies was achieved through careful attention to regimen, which was articulated in humoral physiologies as the manipulation of the six non-naturals: six environmental factors that were thought to be hugely influential in the maintenance of bodily health. As Alexander Hamilton noted in his Treatise of Midwifery, ‘more, in general, is to be expected of regimen than medicine’.15 Alongside food and drink, these components of physiological health were air, motion and rest, sleeping and waking, excretions, and passions (or emotions). ‘By a careful attention to regimen and manner of living’, Hamilton proclaimed cheerfully in 1781, ‘women have a good chance, when this period [of birthing] is happily over, of afterwards enjoying a very comfortable state of health’.16 Throughout the eighteenth century, therefore, food, drink and exercise were crucial in preventing illness, easing discomfort and curing common childbed problems. As we shall see, most foods associated with the birthing chamber had warming properties that were understood to be easily digested. The warmth was thought to restore heat and dryness to an unusually cold and moist body while also providing nourishment (particularly broths and other simple foods) without diverting the body’s meagre resources away from recovery into the processes of digestion. As foods that were repeatedly served within the confines of the birthing chamber, however, they became synonymous with that point in the life cycle, acquiring customary and celebratory functions alongside their nutritional and medicinal properties. Furthermore, these interlocking functions of food and drink were so widely understood that they were routinely used to communicate the health and well-being of the mother and the infant to family, friends, neighbours and health-care practitioners.

Alongside their role in nourishment and physical restoration, food and drink also occupied an important position in the social and cultural landscape of eighteenth-century communities. In offering hospitality to the neighbourhood, the household in which the birth had taken place signalled its willingness to partake in the networks of trust and information that were so important to the operation of neighbourly communities. In accepting this hospitality, their neighbours reinforced the networks of obligation and duty that were crucial in the day-to-day operation of community.17 As we shall see in Chapter 5, this emphasis on reciprocity during childbirth tied the household into its social, cultural and physical landscape. This was epitomized in the custom of gifting – a ritual perambulation of the neighbourhood based on the sharing of food and drink. Regional variations of dishes and understandings of collective identity based on locally grown foodstuffs added a further layer to the way in which notions of community were expressed and understood through food and drink.18 Food and drink were therefore a source of strength, celebration and medicine while it also enabled the community to order its experiences of the life cycle.

Giving caudle

The giving and taking of caudle was particularly associated with the processes of birthing. Caudle was essentially a hot drink consisting of a thin gruel mixed with wine or ale and either sweetened or spiced. It was generally prepared over the fire that would be lit in the birthing chamber once confinement had begun, and was taken by both the mother and her attendants throughout the delivery.19 The dual function of caudle – as nourishment for the birthing mother and as enjoyable tipple for those who attended her – was acknowledged throughout the letters written by Betsy Ramsden and her husband to their friends. They twice used the term ‘caudle’ as a euphemism for labour and delivery. They also used it to describe the hospitality that was provided to visitors to the house in the weeks following the birth. In a letter composed in April 1768, Betsy wrote to her friend Elizabeth Shackleton: ‘I had the honnor of giving caudle to my Best of Sisters the only time I have seen her since she was marry’d.’20 As will be shown in Chapter 4, it is likely that Betsy’s sister made a significant effort to be with her during this birth. Betsy’s use of the term ‘caudle’ therefore emphasizes the link between her sister’s presence and her recent delivery, making it clear that it was more than simply a social visit. In other letters, Betsy and her husband, William, referred to their social engagements as ‘drinking tea’ or ‘having Company’. For the Ramsdens and their correspondents, caudle was sufficiently entwined with the process of giving birth to act as a shorthand to describe childbirth-related sociability.

This sociable element of taking caudle was a popular target for satirists and writers. The Humorist’s essay to ‘Mrs H— on her Birth-Day’, printed as part of a satirical volume of essays on a wide variety of topics from ‘weather’ to ‘stock-jobbers’, made specific reference to birthing chamber visits:

The Midwife and the Gossips came

With many a civil —prating Dame

From ev’ry Parish, far and near,

With Scandal, which brought up the rear,

At Groanings,21 you are sure to meet,

Scandal and Caudle for the Treat.22

Literary references to ‘Caudle-Brewers’ and ‘Caudle-Gossips’ reinforced the stereotype of female sociability at this point in the life cycle.23 Many caricatures of birth attendants drew on the typecast of older, sexually experienced, bawdy, drunken women. The seventeenth-century satirist Ned Ward, for example, regularly associated the birthing chamber with drunkenness and the exchange of sexually explicit stories.24 In his Repository of Wit and Humour, published in 1757, one of his characters described how

I was at a gossiping club,

Where we had a chirruping Cup25

Of good humming liquor, strong Bub26

Your husband’s Name there was up:

For bearing a wonderful Sway

For he is a Cuckold, they say.27

As we have already seen, the word ‘gossip’ was also strongly connected to the birthing chamber and female sociability throughout the early modern period, making its use alongside ‘caudle’ particularly evocative. Birthroom sociability was not, however, the sole preserve of sexually experienced women. As we saw in Chapter 1, newly delivered women were visited by men and unmarried women throughout the lying-in period. In a letter to Elizabeth Shackleton following the birth of his fourth and final child, Dick, William Ramsden complained that Betsy not only had a ‘chamber full of Gossips’, but one of them was ‘a Reverend Doctor of Divinity’. He continued, ‘Pray do the ladies of Lancashire take the Benefit of the Clergy on the like occasions?’28 The overarching tone of his letter was light, suggesting that the entertainment of men as well as women during the lying-in period was not particularly unusual.

While all visitors to the birthing chamber could partake in caudle, knowledge of its production was restricted by gender and, to a lesser extent, by marital and maternal status. Caudle was made in the birthing chamber once the parturient woman had begun to labour, its production removed from the kitchen, which was the usual centre of cooking activities. The hearth and the kitchen, as Sara Pennell has observed, was the physical and psychological centre of the home, yet during the labour and delivery phases of birthing at least, this was removed to another room in all but the poorest houses.29 This removal restricted knowledge of caudle preparation techniques to those who had access to the delivery room. The women present during the labour and birth were, almost without exception, mothers themselves. Their personal experience of childbirth was important, and a personal relationship with the labouring mother or social status within the community was preferred.30 The preparation of caudle formed and fortified these close relationships to the exclusion of others. Knowing how to make caudle therefore symbolized marital status, life-cycle experience and some level of obstetric expertise.

As Chapter 1 established, women acquired a great deal of practical knowledge about childbirth practices through their presence in birthing chambers. Methods for the preparation of caudle appear to have formed part of this knowledge, which was transmitted orally between women. It was extremely rare for female authors to include recipes for caudle in their recipe collections, whether published and manuscript. Indeed, the only female-authored recipe for caudle in the texts considered in this chapter was a medicinal caudle for the treatment of the flux, found in the collection of Elizabeth Okeover, an elite seventeenth-century woman from Derbyshire.31 The majority of Okeover’s collection of medical recipes is thought to have been collated over the last decades of the seventeenth century, though the recipe for caudle appears to have been written later.32 The heading of this recipe attributes it to a doctor whose name is illegible but who, it is to be assumed by his professional title, was male.

A Caudle for a woman with a fflux in childbed – Dr [illegible]

Take a pinte of Spring water and a pinte of clarit wine, a stick of sinamon ye yolkes of 4 lrge eggs, and a crst of breadlyoe these together and sweeten it with lofe sugar tying hir armes and thyes in the most fleshy places as hard as she can suffer you.33

These ingredients mirror those of the caudles recommended for birthing by accoucheurs. William Smellie recommended water gruel, mace or cinnamon, and white wine sweetened with sugar. Smellie further added that ‘red wine is effective at contracting blood vessels as well as having strength-giving properties’.34 The medicinal emphasis of Okeover’s caudle focused on maintaining strength through egg yolks, sugar and bread, while the cinnamon warmed the humours, encouraging circulation and enabling the body to replace lost blood. Tying the arms and legs of the mother was an attempt to restrict the blood flow to the pelvic area so as to reduce the blood lost in the flux. Work by Elaine Leong on this particular recipe collection has shown that this recipe was marked with a ‘g’ for ‘good’, indicating that it had been selected for testing and had been found effective.35

Elizabeth Okeover was unusual in writing down this recipe for caudle in her compendium. She was part of a rich family tradition of lay medicine and has been linked to two manuscripts in the Wellcome Collection that show a tendency to collect recipes from a wide variety of sources. Richard Aspin’s research into this particular collection of recipes notes that 103 individual contributors are named as sources: twenty medical professionals and nineteen members of the gentry, with the remainder being ‘lay commoners’.36 Unlike other recipes in this volume, that for caudle does not have any notes to suggest that it had been proved in practice. This is in marked difference to a recipe in another repository associated with the same author, entitled ‘The drinke prescribed my Sister in her violent Flux after her Miscarriage’, which is attributed to Dr Dakins and is significantly lengthier and more complicated. Aspin suggests that the book containing the recipe for caudle was written around the time of Elizabeth Okeover’s marriage, sometime around 1670. If so, it would have formed part of a tradition of collecting recipes in anticipation of marriage and leaving the family home, with its networks of trusted medical information.37 It is therefore likely that Elizabeth noted down this recipe for caudle before she had experienced childbirth herself. As a married woman, she would have had some access to the knowledge of birthing practices, though this would have been restricted to information gathered from her peers: this perhaps explains her interest in documenting a recipe that otherwise appears rarely in personal recipe books.

The absence of caudle in women’s recipe collections is striking. Betsy Ramsden’s casual use of the term to describe her birth experiences, derogatory references to caudle in satirical works and the proliferation of caudle recipes extant in accoucheurs’ texts makes it clear that it was an important part of eighteenth-century childbirth. Its absence in manuscript recipe collections is therefore more than evidence of changing tastes or discontinued practice. Instead, the absence of caudle in these works highlights the extent to which it symbolized childbirth. Women did not write down recipes for caudle because these were learned through their attendance at local births and were shared orally. Women acquired a taste for caudle through visiting their friends and neighbours during their lyings-in. They may have tasted different varieties concocted to display the expertise of the midwife or the wealth of the family. Widespread understandings of non-natural medicine and domestic health-care practices meant that women would also have been familiar with the medicinal importance of caudle’s ingredients, which were similar to other household staples such as posset. Successful treatments would have been shared among friends and neighbours, to be recommended if required in subsequent births. Caudle therefore symbolized birth, and in particular the birthing chamber, in a direct and intimate way. Its preparation and consumption functioned on multiple levels: as an accessible form of nourishment for mother and attendants, as a medicinal concoction to treat the imbalance of the body caused by pregnancy and birth, and as an indication of trust, expertise and personal relationships within the community.

Feeding the infant

The manner in which new parents chose to nourish their infant communicated to their friends and neighbours information about their social status, economic situation and education. The decision to dry-nurse or wet-nurse, and the length of time the child was nursed by its mother, indicated power relationships within the home and advertised personal health and sexual availability within marriage. It is important to distinguish between the infant’s first feed and longer-term infant-feeding practices. The first feed, as we shall see, was an event of ritual and symbolic importance. While it was, in some instances, discussed as part of the ongoing debate about maternal breastfeeding, this chapter argues that it was a distinct customary practice, entirely separate from the discourse surrounding breastfeeding in the eighteenth century.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was widely understood that maternal breast milk was the preferred substance with which to feed the infant. In the first half of the eighteenth century, however, many accoucheurs recommended that breast milk not be given until several days after the infant had been born. The infant, it was thought, had been constantly nourished while in the womb and therefore required a period of several days before feeding, in which its body could be cleansed and purged.38 By the end of the eighteenth century, however, accoucheurs were advocating maternal breast milk in the immediate aftermath of the delivery. This was largely due to developing understandings of colostrum, a watery, translucent liquid produced by the mother for approximately forty-eight hours following the delivery. Colostrum is now understood to have a high protein content, including vital maternal antibodies that protect the infant from illness, while also having a purgative function. In many early midwifery manuals, colostrum was described as soured milk and therefore was not considered appropriate to feed the new infant. By the middle of the century, however, many obstetricians argued that colostrum was a diversion of the menstrual blood that had nourished the infant in the womb. Valerie Fildes has dated this shift in understanding to 1748, and suggests that it may be responsible for the rapid drop in infant mortality over the second half of the eighteenth century.39 Subsequent scholarship, however, has suggested other contributory factors in the dramatic fall in deaths in the first year of infancy in this period.40 An examination of women’s life-writings shows that both newly delivered women and their husbands, friends and neighbours placed a great deal of importance on the capacity to breastfeed the child throughout the eighteenth century. As we shall see, breastfeeding signified health and strength in the mother and her infant as well as the depth of her, and her husband’s, parental love.

As with caudle, there are very few records of the infant’s first feed written by women. The comments of accoucheurs suggest that these traditions were learned within the confines of the birthing chamber. Treatises written in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries keep a neutral tone when discussing the first feed. The group of ‘severall students of Physick’ that collated The Child-Bearer’s Cabinet noted, for example, ‘Let there be given unto the Infant new born Honey to lick’.41 The 1737 treatise of the highly trained Lancashire accoucheur Henry Bracken recommended that manna be administered immediately following the delivery.42 William Smellie, meanwhile, recommended a ‘thin pap’.43 Each of these recommendations was intended to purge the infant of amnios, the liquid that had surrounded it in the womb. As the eighteenth century progressed, however, accoucheurs began to denounce what William Cadogan described in his 1772 treatise as the ‘general practice’ of ‘as soon as a child is born, to cram a dab of butter and sugar down it’s throat, a little oil, panada,44 caudle, or some such unwholesome mess’.45

Cadogan’s influential writings on infant care, which were based on his work at London’s Foundling Hospital, epitomize the difficulties experienced by accoucheurs as they looked to displace what they believed to be the archaic and unscientific practices of midwives. In his capacity as physician to the Foundling Hospital, Cadogan was often frustrated by the practices of his female counterparts. His treatise on the management of newborn infants complained:

how far these Nurses … may be persuaded out of their old forms, to treat their Nurselings a little more reasonably, is matter of much doubt. I fear they will be too tenacious of their prejudices, as well as opinionated of their skill, to be easily convinced they are in the wrong.46

The maintenance of these ‘tenacious prejudices’ was multilayered. At a most basic level, they were inexpensive and accessible to almost all levels of society. Customary practices associated with childbirth were often recommended by a family member, friend or neighbour and had usually been performed at their own births. As we saw in Chapter 1, the prominence given to personal experience and networks of trust in birthing made practices such as the first feed difficult to dislodge, as they could be maintained alongside the newer practices advocated by men like Cadogan.

The motivation to administer a purgative to the newborn infant arose from a preoccupation with bodily boundaries and a need to cleanse the child, externally and internally. Throughout the eighteenth century, pregnant bodies were considered to be liminal spaces whose boundaries could be breached by sights, sounds and smells. As we saw in Chapter 1, this led to a preoccupation with the physical definition of boundaries following delivery through the binding of the mother and the swaddling of the infant. Prior to this reinforcement of physical boundaries, it was necessary to remove all traces of the infant’s time in the womb, including the contents of its stomach. This procedure was accomplished not just through oral purging but also by the cleansing and manipulation of the infant immediately after delivery.47 The application of alcohol as part of this cleansing process ensured that the vernix, the white waxy substance that covered the infant’s skin throughout pregnancy, could be quickly removed without leaving any residue. Physical manipulation of the infant’s head and body helped the purgative to take effect while also straightening the limbs from their foetal position and closing the fontanelle.48 By removing all physical evidence of their time in the womb, the infant was defined and made human. Only at this stage were their physical boundaries reinforced by the application of swaddling bands.

William Cadogan argued forcibly against the administration of the first feed to newborn infants:

Nature neither intended that a Child should be kept so long fasting, nor that we should feed it for her. Her design is broke in upon, and a difficulty raised that is wholly owing to mistaken management … were the Child kept without food of any kind ’till it was hungry, which it is impossible it should be just after the birth, and then applied to the Mother’s breasts; it would suck with strength enough, after a few repeated trials, to make the milk flow gradually, in due proportion to the Child’s unexercised faculty of swallowing and the call of it’s stomach.49

Cadogan also explicitly acknowledged the difficulty he faced in propagating his ideas. Recently delivered women, and the midwives or accoucheurs who attended them, were occupied in the period following the delivery with extracting the afterbirth and mitigating the risks of haemorrhage or other postpartum complications. Responsibility for the infant’s care was passed on to the birth attendants, who might administer the infant’s first feed without the knowledge or consent of the mother. That Cadogan and his contemporaries were still bemoaning the practice in the last decades of the century suggests that it was difficult to displace. This tenacity was due to the multiplicity of ways in which the first feed was thought to benefit the infant. It was thought to purge the newborn body, helping to reinstate bodily boundaries that had been in flux throughout the pregnancy, and to give strength and nourish the infant following the trauma of delivery. Finally, the first feed was also part of a birthing regime that had been widely practised and valued beyond living memory. The practice had been transmitted and supported by women who were respected for their knowledge and experience – mothers, grandmothers, neighbours, friends and midwives – and this made it difficult to displace.

The attitudes of accoucheurs, midwives and their patients to the first feed were distinctly different from their opinions on infant-feeding practices in general. It was widely agreed that maternal breast milk was the preferred method of infant nourishment, at least for the first month of the infant’s life. Early writings often focused on the medical benefits to all parties of feeding the infant on maternal milk. The apprenticed surgeon and accoucheur John Memis noted that ‘such [Women] as are healthy suckle their own Children, have good nipples, their milk coming freely, are seldom or never seized with this [milk] fever’.50 These ideas were not new but part of a tradition of maternal breastfeeding that is visible in medical and conduct literature throughout the seventeenth century.51 As the eighteenth century progressed, however, the imperative to breastfeed was no longer articulated in terms of nature and health but of maternal duty and moral virtue. The London-based surgeon Benjamin Lara’s Essay on the Injurious Custom of Mothers not Suckling their Own Children was typical of this new style of writing. He commenced his tract with the question:

Is not the duty of a mother’s fostering her infant in her bosom, more pressing than the duties of the card-table, or the most animated representation at the theatre? Would not the little innocent’s heavenly smiles amply repay every maternal affection?52

Lara then tied a mother’s natural duty to breastfeed to her religious and moral purity by suggesting:

Let not those who bear the sacred name of Mother, suffer fashion to pervert their reason, but with a virtuous intrepidity press their infants to their bosoms, and there let them regale on the healthful and delightful stream which flows from ‘That sacred shrine where female virtue glows’.53

The notion that women, particularly those of a higher social class, did not breastfeed their infants because they were enjoying their usual frivolous pursuits was a common one throughout the eighteenth century. James Gillray’s satirical print ‘The fashionable mamma, or, The convenience of modern dress’ (1796) (fig. 3.1) is often invoked to illustrate the distaste of upper-class women for breastfeeding. It depicts a fashionably dressed woman sitting on an upright chair wearing a loose, high-necked nursing dress with two embroidered slits to reveal her breasts. A nurse holds the infant while it suckles, whose only contact with the mother is her left hand on the back of its head. A carriage is clearly visible through the window, ready to take the ‘fashionable mamma’ to her evening’s entertainment. Gillray emphasized this common trope by including a picture on the wall entitled ‘Maternal Love’, depicting a curvaceous woman of lower social status swathed in loose white clothing in a rural setting, holding her infant close as she feeds it.

Fashion was, however, only one consideration in a new mother’s decision to breastfeed. Many historians have suggested that aristocratic distaste for breastfeeding was a form of patriarchal control.54 Aside from ill health, it has been suggested, women cited the sexual or reproductive demands of their husband (as abstinence while breastfeeding was preached if not practised), and the worry that breastfeeding would affect the mother’s body shape, as reasons to send their infants out to nurse. William Cadogan addressed these concerns directly:

Woman that can prevail upon herself to give up a little of the beauty of her breast to feed her offspring; though this is a mistaken notion, for the breasts are not spoiled by giving suck, but by growing fat. There would be no fear of offending the husband’s ears with the noise of the squalling brat. The Child, if it nursed in this way, would be always quiet, in good humour, ever playing, laughing, or sleeping. In my opinion, the Man of sense cannot have a prettier rattle (for rattles he must have of one kind or other) than such a young Child.55

3.1 James Gillray, ‘The Fashionable Mamma, or The Convenience of Modern Dress’, coloured etching, 1796. Public domain.

Different concerns are evident among lower-status women, among whom maternal breastfeeding appears to have been curtailed by economic necessity. In locations and professions where women’s work was relatively well paid, a mother’s financial contribution to the household may have substantially outweighed the cost of employing a nurse. Where older children could be relied on to care for younger siblings, dry-nursing might also be considered an option, enabling the mother to work outside the home. Other considerations may have been seasonal, with infant mortality rising during periods of harvest; numerous demographic surveys have related this to maternal breastfeeding.56

Women’s writings from the eighteenth century show the extent to which maternal breastfeeding was a culturally embedded practice across social groups. The correspondence of Rebekah Bateman repeatedly refers to the feeding of her own children and those of her friends and family. Rebekah’s correspondence with her sister Elizabeth demonstrates a marked assumption that each of them will breastfeed her infant unless she is physically unable to do so. What is more, there is no indication in their letters that their husbands objected to such a practice. Rebekah even discussed infant feeding with her husband in some detail, implying that he approved of the practice and encouraged her in it. In 1792, having travelled to London to attend her sister during her third birth, she wrote a note to him about her sister’s condition: ‘Sister is much better than I expected to find her, she has had a gather’d breast the last & it is not well yet, the little girl is a fine Child but not very well & rather tedious.’57 Two weeks later, she informed him: ‘My sister has been in tears most of this morning owing to the Child being poorly, & not willing to suck, the Mother seems rather better tonight & I wish the Babe was so too.’58 For Rebekah and her sister, the infant’s well-being was directly connected to its ability and inclination to breastfeed and it was a matter of concern to them both when it did not. The infant improved rapidly in the first three months of life. When Elizabeth wrote to her sister to update her about the child’s progress, she used breastfeeding as a marker of physical health:

I find it she is so fond of the Breast & grows so much stronger that I think that is one reason of my Breast having the skin off however I hope that will soon be better – & would be thankful it is no worse than it is.59

Betsy Ramsden expressed a similar understanding of the link between maternal breastfeeding and infant health in her letter to Elizabeth Shackleton dated 24 September 1777. She signed off her letter with ‘I hope I shall keep it [breastfeeding] up or else my little boy will suffer as he takes no nourishment but the Breast’.60 Three years later, Elizabeth expressed surprise about her grandson’s good health despite his being ‘oblig’d to be brought up by the spoon as his Mother has not milk for him’.61 When her daughter-in-law gave birth for the second time, she was again unable to breastfeed, and Elizabeth expressed her concern in a letter written soon after the delivery.

God Bless him he has already experienced his Disappointments what a pity he co’d not have the breast. If he thrives with his Pots it may come to keep up his present Corpulency. His Uncle namesake was brought up by hand and he is no skeleton.62

For each of these women, their ability to breastfeed and the infant’s ability to suckle was evidence of the physical and mental well-being of both mother and child. Where breastfeeding was difficult or impossible, there was an anticipation of illness or even death in both the mother and her infant. This link between breastfeeding and health was so widely understood that it could be used to communicate the extent of mother’s and child’s recovery throughout the process of birthing.

The association between health and breastfeeding was not new. Elizabeth Shackleton’s understanding of breastfeeding and of health was of long standing and appears to have been widespread among those of her age and social circle. During her own experiences of pregnancy and birth, almost thirty years before her grandchildren were born, Elizabeth’s letters demonstrated a preoccupation with maternal breastfeeding among her friends, and an informed comprehension of how it impacted on infant health. Her friend Jane Scrimshire wrote several times to enquire if Elizabeth intended to breastfeed her children.

I should be glad to know whether you intend the little one to suck or not. I hope you do as My Boy has hitherto by God’s permission succeeded so well. He is very forward of His feet and has got two teeth.63

There was clearly an understanding among these women that maternal breast milk was the preferred nourishment for their infants and one on which the child was most likely to survive infancy. This understanding had been so impressed on these women that they persisted in breastfeeding even when they were ill, which could otherwise have provided them with a socially acceptable reason to employ a nurse for the child. Jane Scrimshire’s letter to Elizabeth Shackleton framed her difficulties in terms of maternal duty:

I have been almost Blind and am still dim sighted: it is thought that Suckling is the occasion of it – but I don’t care to give a heart to that subject, as my little Tommy shall not lose his only comfort, tho his mama’s peepers suffer for it.64

Betsy Ramsden’s letters were written in a similar tone, suggesting that persistence with breastfeeding despite personal suffering was a socially recognized demonstration of maternal love and devotion:

The Lying in Bed and the anxiety about my Little Boy makes me not clever and my head aches not a little but I hope I shall keep up or else my little boy will suffer as he takes no nourishment but the Breast – as a Nurse I hope now that you will excuse my scribbles.65

Rebekah Bateman’s sister Elizabeth’s afflictions during breastfeeding were less about overall health and more about soreness as a direct result of suckling. After the birth of her third child, Elizabeth wrote: ‘My nipples are still very sore at times but I am thankful I can suckle to some good purpose at any rate.’66 Her sister was fully aware of the painful effects of breastfeeding but also of its potential impact on a new mother’s psychological health. Having stopped breastfeeding her first child to travel, Rebekah wrote to her husband:

I have been & still am very much perplex’d with my milk it has not disordered me any further than being painfull for ye springing of it in, as fresh today as when I left you at first – I am oblig’d to draw it myself two or three times a day, which I assure you sometimes makes me very low tho’ upon the whole I am better than I ever thought I should have been.67

None of these women expressed concern about the impact of breastfeeding on their physical appearance. Indeed, that they conspicuously breastfed throughout personal illness and acknowledged pain indicated the extent to which maternal breastfeeding was socially accepted and expected. Moreover, it is demonstrative of the extent to which maternal breastfeeding had come to be considered an expression of maternal devotion to the infant. Pain and illness were socially accepted justifications for the employment of a wet nurse, reiterated by the authors of both popular and medical literature. To continue to breastfeed despite experiencing difficulties conspicuously conveyed the extent of the writer’s maternal love and duty to her infant.

Despite an acknowledgement in many of these women’s letters that breastfeeding was painful work, remedies for sore breasts were noticeably absent in accoucheurs’ published treatises. Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, recipes to ease painful breasts were given a great deal of prominence in manuscript recipe books. While sore breasts were not considered to pose a serious threat to maternal health, they nonetheless presented women and their immediate carers with a cause of distress. Recipes for sore breasts were applied topically rather than internally, and followed humoral principles by heating the area to draw out excess liquid. Elizabeth Okeover’s collection contained several recipes for breast pain and differentiated between the types of affliction. Her first is for ‘A poultice to dissolve hard Breasts’: ‘Take white bread & milke boyle it to a poultice lay it as warme as you can suffer it twice a day this is good to dissolve an inflammation so it is taken at the beginning.’68 This was essentially a basic recipe. Warming the breast would not only ease the pain, but it was also thought to restore the flow of milk, thus removing any obstruction within the body. While Okeover’s recommendation of white bread indicates her social status, a version of this remedy was accessible to almost all households. It did not require specialist knowledge or ingredients. The basic recipe of bread and milk could be adjusted to account for specific ailments. ‘For a soare breast sweld and not broken’ she recommended:

Take a white Lilly roote pull of it outward skim & boyle the roote in a little new milke still stiringe it till it be as thicke as a hasty pudinge then spread on a cloath & lay it on the breast reasonable hot it will gather & breake it.69

The roots of white lilies were thought to be efficient at ripening and breaking sores. Furthermore, these roots already had associations with childbirth, as Nicholas Culpeper also recommended them for a speedy delivery. Again, these ingredients were easily accessible to all levels of society. Culpeper noted in his description of white lilies: ‘It were in vain to describe a plant so commonly known in every one’s garden; therefore I shall not tell you what they are, but what they are good for.’70 Another variation of the recipe in Okeover’s collection dispensed with milk, but still used warmth and topical application as active curative agents. Her recipe ‘For an Ague in a woman’s breast’ recommended: ‘Take Rosemary boyle it in running water till stronge hould the breast over the streame a pretty while keepe it very warme afterwards.’71 The curative properties of rosemary were generally seen as wide-ranging, as was its availability. Culpeper recommended that an oil of rosemary ‘be preserved as previous for divers uses, both inward and outward’.72 The warmth provided the sufferer with relief from the pain and swelling while drawing out any infection or obstruction.

The recipe collection attributed to Katherine Ranelagh also contains several recommendations for dealing with sore breasts. These are occasionally included in lists of suggestions for cure-alls, but many are specifically for the treatment of nursing women.73 The ingredients for these remedies were generally inexpensive to procure and easy to prepare. Her ‘Medicine for a Sore Breast’ advised:

Take two yolks of eggs and beat them on a trencher and put to them one Spoonfull of honey then take about the bigness of a walnut of pure hogs lard without salt and bruise it amongst it with the point of a knife, if you see the Breast be like to break put in half a spoonful of venice turpentine and mix it with these other things, put in as much fine wheat flour as will thicken it like a fine past so as to spread upon Holland or fine Douglas so warm the plaister a little before the fire and put it on, as the Breast drys it still put on a fresh plaister and keep the breast washt clean with warm Milk and Water, if the Breast do break make tents of Lint and spread them with this plaister and put in and wear the plaister a top of the tents and continue it till the Breast be well, this plaister put on any woman’s Breast as soon as she is brought to bed will put back the Milk and keep her from a sore Breast. If you find that there be an ague in the breast take a wooden disk and put it into a pot of boyling water that the disk may boyle in the water then take it out and put it as hot to the breast as it can be endured and hot cloths upon the breast this will sweat the breast and take the ague out of it then dress it with the plaister.74

Again, the key agent in effecting the cure in this recipe is heat. As in Elizabeth Okeover’s collection, the author of the collection attributed to Katherine Jones had several other recipes for the same ailment. It is again notable that, despite the collector’s elevated social status, all of the recipes for a sore breast contain ingredients that Culpeper described as ‘generally known’. This suggests that, despite these recipe collections belonging to elite families, the ingredients at least were easily accessible. For example, one recommendation ‘for a sore breast to Ripen it and Heal it or any other Swelling or Ulcer’ suggested:

Take Cow dung and fresh butter, mix them well together & heat it in a pan and apply it as hot as you can suffer it, when it is drawn take Sheeps Suet and Cow dung and by God’s help it will cure.75

In this receipe the animal products act as a binding agent to keep the heat close to the skin. Another recipe requires the use of red roses, chickweed and mallows simmered in milk. Roses were known for purging watery humours and were particularly associated with treating the womb.76 Chickweed and mallows were good for treating swellings, with mallows being particularly effective against ‘hard tumours and inflammations, or impostunes or swellings’ when mixed with roses.77 Moreover, all were common garden plants that could be obtained easily and cheaply. These recipes were not only prominent in the collections of families with an interest in medicine and healing. Recommendations for sore breasts could also be found in more eclectic collections, among food recipes and veterinary remedies. The recipe book attributed to Elizabeth Hirst (collected between 1684 and 1750) suggested:

Take a little chickwood & a little growndsell, & a little Dandelion, & make a pultess of barly meale or Rye meale, so a small quantity of Sheep or Hoggs Suitt & wn it is almost boyl’d put in ye herbs & lay it on ye brest pretty warme.78

Writing at a similar time, the collection of the Meade family contained extensive entries for the treatment of sore breasts, many of which are accompanied by notes of attribution. Several of the Meade recipes for childbed-related complaints were attributed to ‘Nurse Campon’. Some ambiguity surrounds the use of the term ‘nurse’ in this period. It was used widely to describe women who provided care to children and ill adults, but the term also had strong links to birthing.79 It was common for women to refer to their professional childbirth attendants as ‘nurse’. Frances Irwin, as we have seen, was delivered of her third daughter by ‘Nurse Tyson’, who ‘acted the part of Sage Femme [midwife] with the utmost skill and propriety’.80 The regular accreditation of Nurse Campon with remedies and recommendations for complaints associated with childbirth throughout the Meade volume suggests that she may have been in attendance at several family births. Nurse Campon recommended a warm plaster of figs and hog’s grease both to ease the pain of a sore breast and to ‘draw it to a head’.81 The curator of the Meade recipe book was assiduous in noting the sources of collected recipes, and another name repeatedly cited in childbirth remedies was Frances Kent. Her remedy for sore breasts required the application of rose leaves and mallows boiled in milk.82

These attributions in the Meade recipe collections offer a glimpse of the ways in which women shared information about childbirth. Recipes that came from trusted sources or that had been successfully used in other births were noted down, and may have been given preference where a treatment was required. The variety and ubiquity of treatments for sore breasts in these recipe books suggests that it was a common ailment during the lying-in phase of birthing. The treatments for this ailment were generally warming, were applied topically to alleviate pain and discomfort, and were often accompanied by physically drawing milk from the breasts to clear obstructions and release excess humours or fluids. Therefore similar remedies may have formed part of the oral tradition, with more complex versions of the remedies being noted down by collectors of recipes such as Katherine Jones, or by women who did not yet have access to the networks of communication along which these remedies were usually transmitted.

While recipes for the relief of sore or broken breasts appear primarily in manuscript recipe collections, published treatises focused on the treatment of milk fever. Its cause was thought to be the onset of lactation and it was particularly associated with immoderate or unsuitable eating habits in the days that followed delivery. A key symptom was, however, obstruction of the breasts. As this was also thought to be the cause of sore or broken breasts, treatments for milk fever generally followed the basic form of lay treatments for sore breasts. Warmth was frequently recommended, though this was common in the treatment of all fevers to sweat out the ill humours. William Smellie, along with many of his peers, warned that inappropriate food in the hours following birth would lead to a milk fever and death: ‘Every thing that is difficult of digestion, or quickens the circulating fluids, must of necessity promote a fever; by which, the necessary discharges are obstructed, and the patient’s life endangered.’83

However, Margaret Stephen, a prominent teacher of midwifery and mother of nine children, discussed milk fever in a manner that suggests it was an anticipated part of childbirth:

Although the after-pains are not so great in the first lying-in, the milk fever is much greater than in any afterwards; and great care should be taken to keep the patient undisturbed, and in gentle perspiration. Her diet should be of a cooling nature, more of liquids than solids; she should take a saline draught every six hours and an opening draught the third day at the farthest; her breasts should be drawn as often as she can bear, without being over fatigued, and nothing strong should be given while the fever continues.84

The similarity of the symptoms under discussion suggests that the difference between sore and broken breasts and milk fever was one of medical language. While lay recipes for this ailment focus their treatment on the area in which pain or discomfort was felt, those who had been medically trained looked to the digestive system as the root of the disorder.

Breastfeeding, it can be surmised, was an issue of central importance to women in the days and weeks following their delivery. They used descriptions of breastfeeding to articulate the health of the infant to friends and family from whom they were separated. It was widely recognized that breastfeeding caused the mother pain and discomfort, which therefore functioned as an expression and measure of maternal love. The sharing of ways in which to alleviate some of the suffering expected as a result of such devotion was rooted in domestic medicine and in established networks of trust, information, knowledge and advice between family, friends and neighbours.

Food for the mother

Dietary regimes for the mother were commonly included in published midwifery texts. These tended to mirror those recommended for invalids, reflecting the view of the medical establishment that pregnancy and birth were illnesses that required treatment. These diets had various key functions: the replenishment of strength following the delivery, the alleviation of common postpartum complaints and the proper nourishment of the child through maternal breast milk. It is notable, however, that these dietary recommendations do not appear in women’s life-writings or in manuscript recipe collections. As we have established, women’s information about birthing was transmitted orally between networks of experienced and trusted individuals. It was expected that a newly delivered mother would be attended by women who were experienced in this phase of birthing, and who would prepare food for them and help them with childcare. This type of help was not restricted to rich women. David Davies, a social commentator and Anglican churchman, included the cost of ‘the attendance of a nurse for a few days’ in his summary of lying-in costs for the poor of his parish in 1796.85 The influence of non-natural medicine, where digestion was a key proponent of recovery, pervaded all levels of society. Heavy foods that were difficult to digest were thought to divert the body’s energies away from recuperation following the rigours of labouring and delivery. The prescription of light foods, therefore, sought to ensure that the newly delivered body was not overtaxed. Meat and stimulating liquors were thought to stimulate blood flow, further overstretching the capacity of the sick body to maintain a healthy balance. Henry Bracken recommended:

As to food at this time, it should be such as is of easy Digestion, for Example, Chicken, White Meats, Broths, or such like, and if low spirited she may now and then take a Glass of White-wine; but I forbid the Use of Strong spirituous Liquors, such as Aniseed, or Juniper Waters, which are (thro’ a mistaken Notion) often drunk by Lying-in women to hinder windy griping Pains, as I have already said.86

Twenty years later, William Smellie, wrote a far more detailed dietary plan for new mothers:

Her food must be light and easy of digestion, such as panada, biscuit, and sago:87 about the fifth or seventh day she may eat a little boiled chicken, or the lightest kind of young meat: but, these last may be given sooner or later, according to the circumstance of the case, and the appetite of the patient. In the regimen as to eating and drinking, we should rather err on the abstemious side than indulge the woman with meat and strong fermented liquors, even if these last should be most agreeable to her palate: for we find by experience, that they are apt to increase or bring on fevers, and that the most nourishing and salutary diet, is that which we have above prescribed.88

At the end of the century, the midwife Margaret Stephen recommended:

With respect to diet, that should be light, consisting of chicken broth, beef tea, veal broth, panada, chocolate made very light, water gruel &c. with all which they may eat toasted bread, and they should carefully avoid spirituous liquors. When a woman is free of fever, a little wine may be put into her gruel and panada. Animal food is very improper till the milk fever is over, and also for those women who have a keen appetite after delivery, (and there are such) for if they indulge it with solid food, they are sure to suffer on account of it; for they will either take the gripes and cholic, or their appetite will leave them the latter part of the time, when they should eat hearty.89

The desired simplicity of these postpartum diets was often compared to the regimes of lower-status mothers. It was not unusual for accoucheurs to extol the breastfeeding practices of ‘rural’ mothers, as we saw reflected in James Gillray’s picture of ‘The fashionable mamma’, and this was also extended to postpartum diets. The accoucheur William Moss explained in his treatise of 1781:

The benefits attending a simplicity of diet are very fully displayed in country women, who enjoy good health themselves, and have the comfort and satisfaction of dispensing that invaluable blessing to their offspring; – the best gift that can be bestowed by a parent! – and which parents of this class are indebted to for this simplicity, which their stations and situations impose upon them; aided by exercise and pure air, to be immediately spoken of.90

William Cadogan similarly suggested that simplicity of diet benefited both mother and infant in the weeks following the delivery. His Essay on Nursing observed:

Health and posterity are the portion of the poor, I mean the labourious. The Mother who has only a few rags to cover her child loosely, and little more than her own breast to feed it, sees it healthy and strong, and very soon able to shift for itself; while the puny insect, the heir and hope of a rich family, lies languishing under a load of finery that overpowers his limbs, abhorring and rejecting the dainties he is crammed with, till he dies a victim to the mistaken care and tenderness of his fond Mother.91

Despite being repeated throughout the period, the idealized femininity of the rural mother seems to have had little impact on the way in which women perceived their social and maternal role, though it has been argued that it formed part of the domestication of women that took place throughout the eighteenth century.92 Discussions of women’s dietary intake following their delivery tended, instead, to focus on the humoral importance of reinstating bodily balance following the imbalance of pregnancy and birth.

Dietary excess did not just hamper the body’s recovery from pregnancy and childbirth, but it had the potential to endanger life. As we have already seen, inappropriate food and its immoderate intake during this vulnerable period of health could lead to overexcitement of the humours or the overexertion of nature’s healing processes, leading to a bodily surfeit and the risk of flux, or flooding. Identifying and treating flux was particularly problematic for accoucheurs, as moderate bleeding in the aftermath of the delivery was considered beneficial to the mother. Lochial flow was judged essential to balance the body following a delivery, as it acted as a counterweight to lactation. Postpartum bleeding, already subject to contradictory concerns about impurity and cleansing, was also used as an indicator of maternal and foetal health during the delivery. While moderate bleeding was considered beneficial, excessive bleeding placed both mother and infant at serious risk of death. This appears to have been a particular concern of accoucheurs. The unpublished case notes of the Leeds-based accoucheur William Hey show his conflicting attitude to blood and bleeding throughout his practice. In some instances, bleeding led to the patient’s recovery. On 20 January 1760 he attended the wife of John Swithenbank, whose child he delivered in a posterior position.93 His patient was feverish, which Hey attributed to a midwife prescribing brandy for sickness.

From this time, she recovered very slowly. About a Fortnight after Delivery she had a sudden and pretty large Flow of Blood from the Uterus, but wch soon abated & went off with a serious Discharge like ye Lochia. She afterwards did well.94

In December of the same year, Hey was called to another difficult birth. The circumstances were similar in that he delivered the infant, but he found that

The Woman complained of a great Pain in her Body and an Hour or two after began to flood; she lost so much Blood as to cause her to faint away for a considerable Time: She grew better towards Evening … The Next Day the lochial Discharge was considerable and the third Day she had another Flooding.95

Despite his managing to stop the flux by prescribing a spermaceti emulsion with laudanum, the mother died six days later.

It was difficult to judge between a discharge that was commensurate with a delivery and a dangerous flux. Alexander Hamilton recommended treating flux through temperature manipulation. He suggested cold air and the application of cold flannels to the lower abdomen to ‘retard the circulation of the blood’. Once the flow of blood had been moderated or stopped ‘by a proper perseverence’, he cautioned against any heating liquids or warming the room for fear that ‘a return of the complaint may be dreaded’.96 William Smellie also recommended ‘cooling and astringent medicines, not only taken internally, but likewise applied externally, and injected into the vagina’.97 These recommendations followed prevailing humoral theory on the basis that, if heat stimulated blood, cold would restrict it.

The importance of following dietary recommendations during birthing was heightened by the widespread understanding that the nutrients of particular foodstuffs, along with personality traits and illnesses, were transmitted to the infant through breast milk. It was therefore imperative that the mother recovered and maintained her health, as any impurity or illness affected both mother and infant. William Moss, a London surgeon, recommended:

The DIET of a nurse ought to be plain, simple, and light of digestion; and chiefly of the vegetable kind: broth, or a little flesh-meat, to those who have been accustomed to them, are proper occasionally, but should not be too much indulged in; they must be free from high seasoning of pepper, salt or anything else of the kind. Good table beer (as it is called) for common drink, and a little ale, or porter, proportionated to the nurse’s constitution and what she has been accustomed to, are very proper. Butter-milk and cheese-whey, in the summer season, or when they can be had fresh and sweet, and agree without causing a griping or looseness, and sit easy on the stomach, may be indulged in by those who are fond of them. Spiritous Liquors, or Wine, of any sort, are upon no occasion necessary to be repeatedly given.98

His suggestion that porter, a dark brown or black bitter, was a suitable drink for lying-in women was presaged in Betsy Ramsden’s letter to Elizabeth Shackleton dated 12 April 1768:

We both go on very well excepting a cold that I got going to church last Sunday which now his is almost well; for as I am a nurse I take great care of my self, and drink porter like any fishwoman.99

William Cadogan was explicit in explaining the effect of an improper diet on breast milk, warning that ‘upon no account should she ever touch a drop of wine or strong drink; much less any kind of spirituous liquors: giving ale or brandy to a Nurse is, in effect giving it the Child’.100 His understanding that alcohol could be transferred from the mother to the infant through breastfeeding was not restricted to the medical establishment. Letters between Rebekah Bateman and her sister Elizabeth show that, while they may not have known the bodily mechanics of the transference of substances throughout breast milk, they were aware that it was part of the breastfeeding process:

Through mercy my Rebekah comes on very well though she has for the two or three last days been sadly troubled with the Gripes which I suppose is owing to my having a cold – I remember you told me that my colds would affect her too.101

Dietary recommendations for nursing women emphasized easily digestible foods that would neither divert the body’s attention away from the production of milk nor cause the milk to go bad, which was a widespread concern of both mothers and their advisers throughout the period. Ideally, a simple diet would support the natural bodily functions of nursing women and prevent any digestive difficulties being passed on to the child in the form of gripes or colic.102 As with breastfeeding while ill or in pain, rigorous adherence to a restricted maternal diet was often presented as evidence of maternal love and duty. There was clearly an understanding that food and drink taken by the mother were passed on to the infant, as were illness and digestive complaints. Conscious attendance to diet was therefore a physical manifestation of maternal devotion; it also had a propensity to articulate social status. While the diet of the rural poor might be emulated, it was made clear by those of the upper and middling ranks that this was done consciously to benefit the child rather than from necessity.

Digestive complaints were a particular focus for both professional and lay midwifery practitioners. Gripe and colic were two of the most common remedies listed for use in childbed, despite it being accepted that the diet of the nurse was responsible for many digestive complaints. For the mother, the focus on the stomach was logical. Her abdomen had recently been evacuated by the infant, and it stood to reason that the result of this vacuum could be pains and digestive complaints. For the infant, its humoral constitution, along with a tendency to vomit and defecate, had a similar effect, and therefore colic and gripe were often cited as the reason for infants crying or refusing to settle. Remedies for these complaints consisted mainly of warming ingredients to dry and warm the moist bodies of mother and infant. Elizabeth Hirst’s collection of recipes ‘approved’ this medicine for colic in the mother:

Take sugar candy comminseeds [cumin seeds], bay berries, anniseeds, grainelseeds & ye inner skin of ye Pidgeons maw & ye pyth yt runns betwixt ye Walnut & kirnell, ye seeds & shugar each half a pennyworth, dry them well, then bray them all together, & use to take a spoonfull at a time or more in white wine luke warme, the best time is morning & evening, tho it may be taken at any time.103

The Meade collection suggested adding fennel, caraway and anise seeds to a posset infused with camomile, mint and mallows. Katherine Jones’s collection notes ‘a present remedy for the Collick. Approved’ to include Romish nettle, white ginger and mother time water. These ingredients were all recommended by Culpeper for consuming phlegmatic humours, for easing stomach pain and for expelling wind.104 These recipes have been annotated as ‘approved’, which indicates that they were tried and tested by the individual who recorded them.105 Few recipes have been found that medicated the infant, implying an awareness of the role of breast milk in passing nutrients and medication on to the infant. The recipe collection attributed to Mrs Meade, however, does record that:

FFor a childe in ye month or older that is troubled with winde or gripinge Give it 1: dropp (or 2: if older) of oyle of Annisseeds, dropp into a little sugar, & putt that into a spoonefull or 2: of beere, & give ye childe.106

As infants were considered pliable and weak in humoral theory, this reduced-strength recipe contained only the essential elements of the remedies prescribed for adults: a warming substance, a liquid to carry the active ingredient and some sugar to make it palatable.

Accoucheurs clearly attached a great deal of importance to the links between maternal health, infant health and diet. The continued primacy of non-natural health care in the eighteenth century not only provided accoucheurs with a framework with which to assess a new mother’s recovery, but it facilitated their communication with her family, nurses and neighbours. This framework, of non-natural medicine articulated using food, was widely understood across society, to the extent that it could be used to communicate the strength and progress of the new mother beyond the confines of the household.

Food and community

As Chapter 5 argues, the birthing chamber was an important physical and cultural space in eighteenth-century society. Visits to the newborn infant and its mother at various stages in their recovery was an integral part of birthing and generally centred around the sharing of food and drink. This was not just convivial hospitality, though this was an important part of communal gatherings in childbirth. The sharing of food and drink between neighbours also reinforced the networks of trust, knowledge and information that were crucial to the management of birth in this period.107 Partaking in celebratory foods associated with childbirth signified participation in the community, creating and reinforcing community boundaries and their related networks of obligation and duty. Socializing and, crucially, the sharing of food created overlapping circles of community, which were uniquely articulated in direct relation to the mother, father and infant at their centre. Communal eating in this sense functioned as a source of primary connection to others, weaving the child into the community, but also providing the community with the opportunity to redefine and rearticulate itself.108 Food in this communal context was also used to identify the infant as a member of the community into which it had been born. Food shared at communal events held protective and divinatory properties, giving adults a sense of agency over what was fully understood to be a precarious yet precious stage of the life cycle.

The tradition of the groaning cake and/or cheese draws together many elements of communal eating and drinking associated with birthing. Descriptions of this birthing chamber tradition are rare and vary across the sources.109 Some writers mention cake, some cheese and some both together. These foods, despite being apparently widespread throughout the eighteenth century, are rarely noted in either personal manuscripts or published treatises. Their existence is almost entirely preserved in the collections of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century folklorists, the extensive range of dates across which the tradition is recorded suggesting not only some ubiquity of practice but also deep roots in popular culture. John Brand, an early compiler of British folklore, recorded several versions of the groaning cake tradition from across the British Isles:

It is customary at Oxford to cut what we in the North call the Groaning Cheese in the Middle when the Child is born, and so by degrees, form with it a large Kind of Ring, through which the Child is passed on the Christening Day.110

In this version of the custom, those who had been present at the delivery of the infant ate the central section of the cake, signifying their status within the family or the neighbourhood. Friends and neighbours who visited during the lying-in period would be served cake outwards from the centre. Those who ate the outer edges of the cake would therefore be those who had attended the infant’s christening, an event that was broadly inclusive. Thus, the groaning cake mapped out the networks of family, friends and community that surrounded the newly delivered infant and the household into which it had been born.

Brand’s observations of groaning cake customs reached beyond the confines of the birthing chamber. He also recorded that ‘Slices of the first cut of the Groaning Cheese are laid under pillows in the North, for the same purpose with those of the Bride-cake’.111 As shown in Chapter 1, the birthing chamber was not exclusively populated by married women. It was common for unmarried women to visit their friends and neighbours soon after they had been delivered, and they could therefore expect to partake in groaning cake customs. It was believed that, by placing wedding cake or (in this instance) groaning cake under their pillows, young women would dream of their future husbands, anticipating their own experiences of birthing. Groaning cake customs did not just temporarily solidify shifting understandings of neighbourhood and community at that moment, but also looked to extend those boundaries to future births.

Unfortunately, collectors of folklore were not particularly interested in recording the ingredients of groaning cake, nor have any extant recipes been found over the course of this research. Fragmentary evidence suggests that, in the north of England at least, the groaning cake was spiced in a similar manner to gingerbread. William Henderson’s 1866 compendium of folklore described Yorkshire groaning cake customs using the term ‘Pepper-cake’, which he likened to thick gingerbread.112 Richard Blakeborough also mentioned the use of pepper cake in his 1898 compendium of Yorkshire folklore traditions.113 Examination of eighteenth-century recipes for spiced cakes suggest some interesting parallels between their ingredients and dietary treatments for common postpartum complaints such as wind, gripe and colic. Common ingredients included caraway, coriander, ginger and nutmeg, all of which had a long-standing association with the birthroom.114 An unattributed English recipe book in the Wellcome Collection includes several recipes for gingerbread, all of which contain spices associated with childbirth:

Take a pound & halfe of Treakle, & 3 quarters of a pound of good butter, set these over a slow fyer keeping it always stirring till it so warm as to melt the butter, having in it half an ounce of fine beaten ginger, & as much fine beaten coriander seedes, then when its of ye fire & but a Little warm, strow into yr flower half an ounce of caraway seedes, & mix so much flower in it as will make a Limber past, then stir in laf a pound of 5 penny sugar, then rowl it out brand & cut it forth with a round glass into little cakes & bake them well.115

Culpeper recorded these ingredients as having warming, strength-giving properties that were compatible with the dietary requirements of both recovering mother and suckling infant.116 The same ingredients formed the basis for a childbirth tradition associated with exceedingly wealthy families in previous centuries, that of comfits.117 Comfits were made of seeds or nuts covered in multiple layers of sugar. The method of making them was lengthy and they were therefore prohibitively expensive for most families. Yet comfits and groaning cake shared many nutritional and customary functions. Their ingredients were understood to have astringent, warming properties that were considered medicinally beneficial to mother and infant throughout the lying-in period. Although the financial cost of obtaining the necessary spices to make a groaning cake lessened over the course of the eighteenth century, they continued to be considered as luxury items, particularly by those of lower status.118 Adding these spices to the groaning cake gave visitors a taste of luxury and access to flavours associated with birthing without the need to purchase large quantities of expensive ingredients.

Communal celebrations of childbirth were not restricted to the household in which the birth had taken place. The emphasis on reciprocity in the customs of eighteenth-century childbirth had a role in maintaining and defining understandings of neighbourhood obligation and duty. The custom of gifting involved the infant in a form of perambulation of the community, which created a reciprocal bond between the infant and the neighbourhood while also linking the infant to the physical environment in which the community operated. As will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5, the act of walking the infant around the neighbourhood bound the infant, its family and its household tightly to the physical landscape into which it had been born. In the context of this chapter, the gifting tradition involved, significantly, the exchange of food. John Brand recorded the custom in the North of England in his Popular Antiquities: ‘It would be thought here very unlucky to send away a Child the first Time its Nurse has brought it on a visit without giving it an Egg, Salt or Bread.’119 Harland and Wilkinson also recorded the tradition in 1867, though they were more specific about the symbolism of the gifts.

It is a custom in some parts of Lancashire, as well as in Yorkshire, Northumberland, and other counties, that when an infant goes out of the house, in the arms of the mother or the nurse, in some cases the first family visited, in others every neighbour receiving the call, presents to or for the infant an egg, some salt, some bread, and in some cases a small piece of money. These gifts are to ensure, as the gossips avow, that the child shall never want bread, meat, or salt to it, or money, throughout life.120

The simplicity of the gifted items was important, for it ensured that the custom was accessible to all members of the community. Eggs were in plentiful supply. The domestic keeping of chickens was widespread in rural areas, and there were supplementary networks of women who maintained the supply of eggs to urban areas.121 In addition, eggs were symbolic of fertility and birth. Salt was found in most households as a condiment and a preservative. It had another function as a protective against maleficium, and was placed in the cradle or over the door of households in the north of England to guard the infant against illness or malevolent spirits until it had been baptized.122 Salt was also used to perform a similar function in funerary rites, where it was placed on the body or at entry points to the room for the period between death and burial.123 It therefore represented both the ability to ensure a continual food supply and spiritual protection. Bread was also a widely available foodstuff that formed a large proportion of the diet for lower-status individuals and it symbolized the ability to survive as well as plenty.124 Its core ingredients would also have been highly variable, as it contained local grains and flavourings, symbolizing the area (and therefore the community) in which it had been produced.125 The importance and accessibility of these gifting traditions highlights most families’ precarious relationship with food. While the reliability of food supply chains and the range of foodstuffs available at all social levels improved throughout the eighteenth century, a fear of food scarcity remained throughout the period.126 Food was also the item on which most of the household budget was spent. David Davies’s rural labourers typically claimed to spend between 75 per cent and 90 per cent of their household income on foodstuffs.127 The gifting of food between neighbours therefore represented the sharing of a valued and expensive commodity. It encompassed hopes for the continued prosperity of the community as well as for the health of the infant.

Conclusion

Food and drink were crucial elements in the management of delivery and birth in the eighteenth century. Despite developments in medical and obstetric theory during the period, the basic principles of humoral physiology remained prominent in both professional and lay understandings of birthing. These principles were embedded within a social and cultural landscape that used food not just as medication, but as an indicator of personal health and status. Food and drink fulfilled multiple functions – social, ritual, nutritional and medicinal – during birthing. They remained a central element of the practical and symbolic management of birth within the home and the wider community, rooted in established networks of trust, information, knowledge and advice that was shared between family, friends and neighbours.

The types of food that were consumed during childbirth separated the mother from her friends and neighbours. While her diet was restricted to light foods that were thought to hasten her recovery from her travail, her birth attendants and visitors celebrated with alcohol, rum butter and cake. The mother’s separation marked the importance of birth as a key moment in the life cycle, and also allowed her health and recovery to be communicated. As the new mother’s health and strength improved, her diet was altered, informing those who visited her of her physical and emotional state and of the quality of the care she had received. Women who were not properly cared for or who did not adhere to the dietary conventions of childbirth were not expected to recover quickly, if at all. There was a similar tendency to assess the infant’s health through its food intake and feeding practices. Likewise, the ability to breastfeed advertised the physical strength of the mother as well her emotional attachment to the infant. This message was emphasized where the mother was struggling to recover or found breastfeeding difficult but nevertheless continued to do so. Food therefore had the capacity to transmit information about emotional state and attachment as well as about physical recovery.

The sharing of food and drink during childbirth tied the new infant and its family into the networks of trust, information, knowledge and advice that were crucial to the way in which community functioned in the eighteenth century. The distribution of food and drink to individuals living close to the household in which the birth was taking place tied the new infant and its family to the physical and social landscape. This was both literal, as we saw in the gifting ritual during which the infant was taken around the neighbourhood, and metaphorical. As we shall see in Chapter 5, attendance at a birth and partaking in the hospitality of the family was crucial in the reinforcement, or redrawing, of community boundaries. As a result, the sharing of food and drink during the birth process articulated the networks of obligation on which the everyday operation of the community relied.

In exploring the role of food and drink in the birth process, this chapter has highlighted the extent of access to knowledge and information about childbirth and the treatment of childbirth-related ailments. It is clear from studying manuscript recipe books alongside published midwifery manuals that methods of managing childbirth were, to a large extent, transmitted orally. As we have seen, manuscript recipe collections rarely provided detail about the management of childbirth while published midwifery manuals dealt with the topic extensively. This chapter has suggested that this demonstrates a culture of oral transmission of information, where most women were educated in the processes of giving birth through their own experiences and by attending the births of others. Accoucheurs, by contrast, did not have the same level of access to these artisanal methods of knowledge creation and thus felt obliged to write extensively on the topic. This gendered approach to childbirth is epitomized in methods for treating sore breasts in the early weeks of infant feeding. As we have seen, easing the pain of sore breasts was a matter of some priority in manuscript recipe books. Many collections contained several recipes for this ailment, all of which were topical applications designed to ease the ache caused by the rigours of breastfeeding, whereas published midwifery treatises took a different approach, attributing breast pain to ‘milk fever’ and recommending dietary treatments. These different approaches to common childbirth ailments embodied the ongoing tensions between the ‘new’ methods of accoucheurs and the ‘old’ ways of midwives. As accoucheurs looked to obstetric science to explain and develop their understanding of birthing, they became increasingly frustrated with the persistence of customary behaviours associated with childbirth. They found that they were unable to displace such customs of birth, rooted as they were in practical experience and propagated through the familiar networks of trust, knowledge and advice that were central to the successful management of childbirth throughout the eighteenth century.