This love an acquired taste
You’re a baby and you don’t know anything about anything except your mother occasionally dresses you as a unicorn (“that’s a narwhal”) and puts you in a funny hat (newsboy cap) that makes you look like a miniature Babe Ruth.
Recently, Henry, the 7-month-old little man was on the cusp of a new culinary life.
“Today we’re going to feed him his first bite of solid food,” said his mother, Lauren.
Her voice had a catch in it. Milestones. Who knows when we will pass this way again.
If this had been Rotary, Henry and his first bite of solid food would have been what service clubs call the program. The “program” was a person of interest, someone who had a story to tell and Henry’s story was he was growing up. Growing into a future that may or may not include dressing like a narwhal.
For the program, Henry’s mother had filled a small Tupperware container with orange mush, sort of a colorful counterpart to the traditional Powerpoint production. Mush is one of those things you eat in the first part of your life and perhaps in the latter stages and blessedly not often in between.
The orange mush could have been made from a lot of things starting with pumpkins, pumpkins being a principal player in the most recent of seasons. If it were pumpkin mush I hoped, for Henry’s sake, it was the sort of mush that’s heaped into a pumpkin pie crust made from sugar, pumpkin pie spice, cinnamon and salt.
Perhaps the mush was sweet potatoes, which would have been my first choice had I any say in the matter. Henry’s mom wisely decided against knowing that had I been able to make Cheetos or circus peanuts into an orange mush for a 7-monthold’s first solid food, I would have at least considered it.
Turns out, the orange mush was neither sweet potato nor pumpkin, but sensibly something carrot-based.
While applauding its health benefits, part of me felt for Henry, imagining his thoughts as “I wait this long and you give me carrots. Is this how it’s going to be?”
Carrots have an identity problem: They’re big, they’re small, horses like them, we’re never sure whether we should skin them because the skin is sometimes bitter but probably contains some invaluable carrot vitamin so we’re pretty much toast either way.
In certain iterations and if you’re lucky to get a sweet bunch, carrots can be quite delicious. Take carrot cake for instance, especially with soft raisins burrowed in its soft walls and covered with a roof of thick, white icing.
Carrot sticks chilled in cold, salty water and served as an appetizer before a good football game are a fresh, bracing snack. Thank you, Harry.
I wasn’t sure about carrot mush and I looked to Henry, or more specifically, Henry’s face, to see whether carrot mush was an underrated category in the carrot constellation.
A child’s face doesn’t lie when it comes to food. Mastery of language doesn’t matter. A child’s face will give an instant smile up or frown down.
Nora, his sister, had the honor of feeding him his first bite of orange mush. Henry’s mom is keen on photo ops and there’s not a much better one than a 4-year-old feeding a baby unless Henry were capable of burying his face into the orange mush himself.
The face doesn’t lie and Henry’s didn’t either. His was a solid no. The orange mush died on his lips. If this had been a military operation, the orange mush troops were stalled, traveling neither forward or backward. “I’d better warm it up,” Lauren said. Good idea. Cold carrot mush might work under certain situations but requires a 40-day fast and perhaps the absence of almost any other available foods.
Warm was better. Warm got a look. Warm broke the stalemate enough for carrots to be logged in Henry’s baby book as his first food.
Life changes daily and never more than for a baby. Leave town for a minute, or not visit, and kids are on to the next thing, the next bit of wonder and the next taste.