reading

What a breath of fresh air for new parents. This fresh, clever and much-needed book gives modern parents bags of reliable know-how for making creative, nutritious and yet affordable baby meals from scratch, every day.

This book has a real edge above other baby cookbooks. The nutritional advice is solid, up-to-the-minute and relatable, and the recipes are refreshingly simple and easy to achieve. Stand-out dishes for me include the ‘one-family-one-meal’ recipes: the curries, stews, chillies and sharing breakfasts such as flavoured pancakes and porridges. Eating together as a family is a fantastic habit to form – not only does it introduce your child to the social aspects of mealtimes, but eating the same thing as a parent can really help a baby accept and enjoy new tastes.

Beth’s other baby-feeding philosophies also make good sense to me as an expert in this field. Her ‘best of both’ approach to the finger food or spoon-feeding question is sensible, and finding ways to combine both feeding methods in the same dish (like the Magic Fish Fingers with crushed pea dip) is very creative. Going big and bold with flavour when cooking for babies is a wonderful rule of thumb. It’s important to stoke a baby’s natural curiosity by exposing them to as many different food flavours, ingredients, textures and cuisines as possible, as early as possible. And I like the idea of parents using their parental judgement to introduce new foods at a pace that they feel is right for their child. That said, Beth has written a handy guide full of tips and hints to guide your intuition week-by week and month-by-month – see here.

I am pleased to see that the core messages in Young Gums are so well aligned with the globally recognised World Health Organization infant feeding recommendations. In line with latest evidence, I am also happy to see the use of unrefined whole grains, whole fruits and vegetables (fibre-rich skin and all – great move!), a wide range of protein sources, and the absence of any refined sugars and refined carbohydrates. Special mention on that last point must also go to the first birthday party celebration table – what a feast, and not a grain of refined sugar in sight. I also love the parent-boosting snacks tucked away at the back of the book. As a parent of a young child myself I am very much on board with the idea of nourishing ourselves as we learn to nourish our babies (I’m also on board with the One Hand Cooking … I’m sure all new parents can relate to this!).

Beth is a refreshing – and welcome – new voice in weaning. She makes this potentially confusing stage of new parenthood feel wonderfully simple, and presents cooking for your baby as an adventure rather than a chore (regardless of how sharp your culinary skills are). You can tell how much fun she has in her own kitchen and I very much hope her enthusiasm inspires yours.

Emma Derbyshire heads up Nutritional Insight Ltd, a consultancy to food, healthcare and Government organisations. She has expertise in maternal and child nutrition. She is also the co-founder of LittleFoodie.Org – an organisation providing expert advice on early year’s nutrition.

Introduction

Hi. Welcome to Young Gums, the modern parent’s guide to raising a happy, healthy eater.

This collection of healthy, creative and fun recipes will guide you from the very start of your weaning journey right through to your baby’s first birthday, and beyond. He or she will encounter a huge range of tasty, nourishing, interesting dishes that I hope will help establish a happy lifelong relationship with good, whole, real food.

This is a baby food cookbook unlike any other. You’ll see ingredients and flavours you might not expect. And you’ll find no rigid month-by-month stages to tick off (although there is a helpful weaning timeline here). Everything here is safe from the very start of weaning and each recipe is flexible enough to evolve in texture, serving style and portion size as your baby develops. And best of all, everything is quick, easy and inexpensive. Some of the dishes are so easy you can make them without even putting your baby down. Welcome to the world of #OneHandCooking.

All nutritional advice has been approved by infant nutrition expert and clinical nutritionist, Dr. Emma Derbyshire, and is in line with up-to-date World Health Organization advice on weaning. As well as Emma, while writing this book I read and spoke to psychologists, dieticians, and food historians, as well as grandmothers and great-grandmothers from different food cultures. Every recipe has been triple-tested for ease, accuracy and tastiness by real parents of real weaning babies – members of the thousands-strong Young Gums online community. Ideas and feedback from all over the world have helped hone these recipes. It takes a village!

The parents in my network also helped me build the Baby Feeding FAQs section here. I asked them what they wished they’d known at the start of weaning, and figured out simple, clear answers to the questions that came up again and again. I hope our collective experiences can help you as you begin your weaning journey.

Speaking of us parents, at the end of the book you’ll find a special selection of recipes just for you. It’s easy to overlook nourishing ourselves as we focus on nourishing our babies, and these nutrient-packed snacks have the power to pick you up and keep you going no matter how badly you slept last night.

In closing, know this: if you choose to cook for your baby, you’re in good company. In fact you’re part of a growing global tribe, and I don’t just mean the Young Gums community. Sales of manufactured baby food are in decline in many countries as more and more Millennial parents choose to cook for their babies.

I hope your baby likes these recipes as much as mine does, and I hope you enjoy reading this book half as much as I enjoyed writing it.

The story behind this book

Some of my earliest memories are of helping my parents and grandparents in the kitchen. I’m from a foodie family and enjoy cooking so the idea of weaning my baby was exciting. It was going to be one LOL after another. The messy-face photos! Cute egg in the hair! Oh, the videos we’d make.

But a couple of weeks before she started solids, I walked with Baby B down the baby food aisle in the supermarket for the first time. And suddenly my excitement melted away, replaced by disappointment with an edge of frustration. So many highly processed foods: vegetable-flavoured maize puffs, flavoured and fortified juice drinks, rice snacks sweetened with concentrated fruit syrup, baby biscuits made with refined flour and artificial flavourings. Almost everything was puréed, and almost everything contained cooked fruit … even savoury things like stews and pasta sauces. And though the aisle was packed, the range of flavours, ingredients and textures seemed pretty narrow and repetitive.

If this was the ‘normal’ modern Western approach to baby weaning, I wasn’t sure I liked it.

That supermarket trip changed my life. It led me to setting up an online content platform that brings together thousands of like-minded mums, dads, grandparents and childcare professionals; to meeting inspiring experts in food, nutrition and parenting; and to writing this book, which contains everything I wish I’d known when I was sitting where you are right now.

Young Gums began at my kitchen table in East London, last year, the morning my baby started solids. I set up an Instagram account and posted a couple of pictures, using the captions to share my feelings about approaching the task of teaching a baby to eat against the backdrop of our chaotic and highly processed 21st-century food landscape. How daunting I found the responsibility, how difficult it was to find nutritious baby food in the shops. Over the coming days I shared my first recipes. Within the week, hundreds of parents had found the account. I connected with nutritionists, academics, food writers, local restaurateurs, food industry experts and even an investigative journalist. I’d struck on something other people thought was important, too.

Establishing and maintaining good eating habits in our children has to be one of the trickiest responsibilities facing a 21st-century parent. It’s widely held that the modern Western childhood diet is too often high in the wrong things, low in the right things, and detached from where food comes from, or what season it is. Children like what they know, and in a world where processed, artificially flavoured foods are abundant, that’s of course what many of them know.

What kids eat early in life matters. Diet-related health conditions are rising steeply in the very young: type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, obesity and more. Sugar-decayed milk teeth are surgically extracted at a rate of 500 cases a week in the UK. Dietary deficiencies from the history books are returning as some kids’ childhoods are spent overfed yet undernourished. It’s not a social ‘class’ thing, far from it. The stats are too widespread. Jamie Oliver famously said in his 2010 TED talk Teach Every Child About Food, ‘Children exposed to unhealthy, highly processed foods are at risk of living a shorter and less healthy life than their parents.’ A shocking statement that’s not nice for any parent to hear, but it focused my mind when I heard it. I’m not here to scaremonger – quite the opposite. I want feeding our babies to be fun and creative and joyful, not a source of anxiety.

The good news? There are so many things we can do, from the very start of weaning, to help our babies grow up familiar with a wide range of real, unprocessed food.

One thing is to go big, early, with flavour. In her book First Bite: How We Learn to Eat, food theorist Bee Wilson refers to evidence stating that between (roughly) learning to sit up and learning to crawl, a baby is psychologically more receptive to new tastes than they’re ever likely to be again. This ‘flavour window’ doesn’t abruptly shut, she says, but does narrow as the child enters toddlerhood, making it more difficult to accept unfamiliar tastes. So let’s go big and broad, early. Wilson also suggests that babies can on some level ‘remember’ flavour profiles from babyhood that stay with them as they grow up and make their own decisions about what to eat.

Another is to eat together with our babies. Psychologists say time spent at the table is invaluable for babies as they learn the social side of eating – the way people share food, eat with cutlery, take turns talking … and don’t rub banana in their hair. Where you can, eat the same food as them – many dishes in this book are meals the whole family can share: tagines, stews, curries, pancakes, and more.

And a third is to familiarise your baby with what real, raw food looks like. Let them watch you peel potatoes or crack eggs. Point out different ingredients when you go food shopping and let them see what you are doing when you are cooking.

An interesting place to learn to eat

Where we live is an important part of the Young Gums story. London Fields, in East London, isn’t just the backdrop to my Instagram blog. It’s also my ongoing source of recipe inspiration. One of the oldest and most cosmopolitan parts of the city, London Fields is now home to a vibrant and creative food scene.

An incredible food market arrives every Saturday. We join queues for Israeli street-food, Mexican burritos, Basque tapas, or bowls of messy-but-worth-it laksa, dhal, gumbo, and chowder. Chilli-scattered bao, steaming dim sum, oil-drizzled arancini. Ancient grain galettes oozing with French cheese. Herb-studded flatbreads oozing with Greek cheese. North African tagines, South African biltong. Brazilian stews, Hawaiian poke. Snacks spiked with pestos, tapenades; squeezes of lime. Then comes gelato, granita, raw cheesecake, spiced popcorn, bliss balls and chia pudding. Real, fresh, tasty food. A world of it in one street.

That kind of food inspiration can’t help but rub off on a mama and you’ll see echoes of this inspiration throughout my recipes.

Mindful baby feeding … huh?

Mindful feeding is how I sum up Young Gums when asked. It means taking a moment to consider the meal you’re about to offer – what’s in it, where it came from, and the effect it’ll have on your baby’s body. ‘Mindfulness’ is a trendy concept we’ve heard a lot recently, but there’s nothing flash-in-the-pan about this approach. It harks back to simpler times, before baby food became so industrialised.

My mindful baby feeding mantras

Don’t feed your baby anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise

The words of world-renowned food theorist Michael Pollan have been ringing in my ears while writing this book. In his bestselling book about the modern adult diet, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, he said, ‘Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food’. Of course, my own great-grandmothers wouldn’t be familiar with some of my ingredients (avocados and blueberries weren’t especially abundant in 1930s rural Ireland, nor along the rugged Welsh coast …), but I know they’d see eye-to-eye with me on my simple, whole food choices and traditional cooking techniques.

It’s not all on you

Pioneering American baby-feeding academic and author, Ellyn Satter, is widely quoted by infant nutritionists – even governments – for her division-of-labour concept: ‘The parent is responsible for what, when, where. The child is responsible for how much and whether.’ It may feel like a strange idea to expect your little person to take responsibility for anything, but it’s very liberating. Provide good food at appropriate times, and trust your baby to eat what they need.

Stoke your baby’s natural curiosity about food

The flavours in this book might seem bigger than you expected. There may be ingredients you wouldn’t have considered to be baby food. But weaning babies can safely eat much more widely than we might think. Going big with flavour now could stand your baby in good stead later in life.

Leave anxiety at the (kitchen) door

Every recipe here is easily achievable no matter how confident you are in the kitchen (and no matter how little sleep you had last night). Ingredients lists are short – easy-to-find, basic things. And methods are quick – no fancy equipment, short cooking times.

Let your baby watch … from your hip

Necessity is the mother of invention. When hunger struck, my baby would never be put down. She had to hug. If I was going to get any cooking done, it was going to have to be with her on my hip … and #OneHandCooking was born.

Baby-feeding FAQs

As every new parent knows, there’s a lot of conflicting advice around weaning. Start with purées, bringing in chunkier textures once the baby’s learned to swallow. No, start with finger food so they learn to chew before swallowing. Encourage the baby to become familiar with a few foods to begin with, establishing favourites they get excited about. No, offer plenty of variety and don’t let the diet become repetitive … that’ll make it much harder to introduce new foods. Offer the baby their own bowl of food so they learn to be independent, eating what they feel like and stopping when they’re full. No, hold the bowl yourself and feed them slowly with a spoon. Let them refuse a food, it’s part of the journey. Don’t let them refuse a food, keep offering it – ten times. No, eight. No, sixteen times should do it. A full tummy will help them sleep through the night. A full tummy won’t help them sleep through the night.

Nutritionist’s foreword

Dr. Emma Derbyshire RNutr PhD