CARING FOR A NEW MOM’S BODY & SOUL
These traditional dishes are warm and soothing after a birth ... and grandma’s love is baked right in
In the days following the birth of my daughter, my plan included the usual Western treatments: ice packs, tush pillows and mesh underwear.
But my background merited an additional, culinary regimen: so-called Jewish penicillin, a.k.a. chicken noodle soup. On one hormone-fuelled afternoon, I wept tears of joy into a steaming bowl of schmaltzy broth — such was its power.
The notion that recovery from childbirth might include a culinary component is standard the world over.
“Foods are all collagen-rich and mineral-dense,” says doula Kimberly Ann Johnson, who researched postpartum foods for her book, The Fourth Trimester (Shambhala).
Right after birth, traditional dishes tend to be “liquidy, brothy, hydrating, warm, easily digestible,” she says. As time passes, they might include “heartier things, so your tissues can rebuild.”
But a dish is often emotional, helping to ground a new mother during a topsy-turvy period.
That was the case for Jennifer Hsiung, who, upon arriving home with her newborn last summer, found a refrigerator brimming with a fragrant chicken stew.
It was from her Chinese mother, who had sublet the apartment below to help Hsiung observe zuo yue zi, the Chinese practice of “sitting the month.”
Anchored by a thick, fatty broth made with braised “old” chicken and Burmese ginger (zingier than the average stuff ), it was enriched by a sweet fermented rice wine lovingly prepared months in advance by Hsiung ’s mother and five aunts.
“They started making (the rice wine) as soon as they found out I was pregnant,” Hsiung says. Soon, they were churning out enough chicken stew for Hsiung to slurp it down “morning, noon and night” for 30 days.
The stew is nutritious, which gives a new mother strength to care for her newborn. Enzymes in the rice wine vinegar are meant to help flush out and contract the uterus. The ginger is to add heat to the body, aiding circulation and fortifying the immune system.
Hsiung’s mother and aunts also said it would ramp up her production of breast milk and improve its quality. “I definitely feel like it did,” Hsiung says.
It’s hard to say if the stew delivered on its other promises, but one thing is certain: “It’s delicious.”
In her family, it goes back at least four or five generations. With each spoonful, Hsiung felt a link between her family’s past and future. She hopes to make the soup for her daughter one day.
These customs date to “the beginning of time,” says Johnson,
“when women took care of each other. Before women thought we were superheroes, we were helping each other, so that as a group, we could collectively thrive.”
There’s little in the way of scientific studies to back up health claims. So is it the dish or the caregiving that aids in recovery?
New Yorker Lavina Lee says her postnatal regimen included heaping bowls of pigs’ feet stew, which she ate at least once a day for several weeks after her daughter’s birth. With her Cantonese parents living far away, Lee’s mother enlisted a family friend to prepare the dish.
“My parents were worried for months about how they were going to get it to me,” Lee says. “I expected them to be really excited to meet the baby, but they were more concerned about making sure that I would recuperate.”
Every family’s recipe is different, Lee says, but hers is a potent mixture of black vinegar, ginger, pigs’ feet and hard-boiled eggs simmered in a clay pot.
“I don’t know that I subscribe to, ‘Oh, this is restoring my balance,’ but, emotionally, it did,” Lee says. “No one could have prepared me for how horrible I felt in the few weeks after my daughter was born. I knew I’d be tired, but I didn’t know physically how defeated I would feel.”
Other postpartum foods across Asia also include hot and fatty soups. Miyeok-guk, a Korean seaweed soup, was a go-to for Los Angeles resident Laura Lambert after the births of her two children.
“To be honest, I got a little sick of it after the first week or two,” she says of the soup her Korean mother made for her. But having prepared food was a lifesaver. “Perfect when you’re at home alone with the baby after everyone goes back to work.”
Rajini Pujari, of New York City, says her Indian parents made sure she ate a lot of goat meat and “always, always rice.”
Soups and stews are also key to la cuarentena, a 40-day confinement traditional to Latin America.
“Everything she eats during this time should be soupy, warm and moist to gradually restore her back to full power,” writes Felicia Cocotzin Ruiz on her site Kitchen Curandera. She recommends sopa de nopalitos, a garlicky cactus soup.
On the other side of the flavour spectrum, Philadelphia resident Jennifer Lea Cohan’s Dutch grandmother encouraged her to eat beschuit met muisjes, hard biscuits made from twice-baked bread and blanketed in butter and sugar-coated anise.
The cookies’ originators reasoned that anise helped deter colic in newborns. Faith in their medicinal properties seems to have dwindled — Cohan wasn’t aware they had any. For her, the benefit was mostly emotional.
“Blue muisjes met beschuit for the birth of my son and pink muisjes for the birth of my daughter; I’m opposed to the gender-specific colours, but very pro the deliciousness,” Cohan says.
The cookies always make Cohan think of her late grandmother, who escaped on the last ship out of the Netherlands before it fell to the Nazis in the Second World War.
“There’s always that concept of my ancestors and who I’m representing to my children,” she says. “I feel it in my heart.”