Good friends send food

On the peculiar beauty of postpartum eating

Hello! My daughter turns two this week and I’m feeling sentimental. Also, hungry. What follows is an essay all about eating when you’re deep in the swamp of new parenthood. If that’s not a topic for you just now, please do give it a miss xx

Everybody knows the rule: when someone has a baby, bring food.

Or, not everyone, but enough people – and definitely everyone who has had one. It wasn’t until I had my own that I really understood how important those postpartum food packages really are; that they trump any number of knitted booties or neutral-toned wooden toys, lovely though those are too.

From the freezer meals that sustained us when punching in numbers on a microwave was all we could manage, to the midnight brownies and hunks of Tony’s Chocolonely that kept us company – and crucially, awake – during night feeds, food was a constant and a comfort while everything else was chaos. I still feel grateful for all of it now.

For all their opposite emotions, there’s a parallel between postpartum eating and the role food plays in times of grief and personal crisis. It’s the same reason people sit shiva with vast buffets, and leave shepherd’s pie on neighbours’ doorsteps. It’s the same reason cooking and baking took on such emotional weight during lockdown. Food provides ritual when your mind is in pieces, and rhythm when your days are all adrift.

If I’m honest, I have very few memories of her from those early weeks, beside the warm dumpling weight on my chest and the tiny gurning faces in my camera roll. But I remember what I watched on Netflix, what I read on my phone in the dark, how I walked around the block with the pram, tense as a security detail, drinking down fresh air like water. And I remember every single thing that I ate.

There was the hamper of fruit that almost made us weep for vitamins we didn’t realise we were craving. The blue cheese that reminded me to be thankful I wasn’t pregnant anymore. The Mini Eggs cheesecake, the frozen pizzas, the homemade dal, all shovelled in one-handed while watching Richard Osman’s House of Games (even now, I swear the theme tune makes my nipples leak). The jar of pasta sauce from the friend who shrugged and said, “I figured new parents need pasta sauce?” (They do!).

She was born on Burn’s Night and so we had haggis a few days later, the neeps and tatties a fittingly soothing, spoonable, nursery mush. Then a haggis sandwich with cheese and chutney in bed the next day.

Even the most basic meals and snacks tasted incredible during those weeks, a recipe I put down to sleep deprivation and the bliss of having decision-making lifted from your shoulders. More than a few times recently, while staring blankly into the fridge wondering how it is somehow time to make another meal, yet again, to do another Tesco shop, yet again, I’ve dreamed of a world where people send food parcels for the first five years. Or, here’s a thought, eighteen?

But more than that, the food tasted incredible because of the love and thought that had gone into it. Those freezer meals and tubs of soup and buckets of M&S cookie dough were all care by proxy; a way for friends and loved ones to pitch in and share a little of the postpartum load, in a culture that doesn’t really do that anymore. We talk a lot about the lack of ‘a village’ in modern childrearing, but here was the village showing up on our plates. Every Cook lasagne and Deliveroo voucher felt like an arm round my shoulders.

One friend, who had her own baby two months earlier, sent a care package of treats that included a bag of unsulphured apricots and walnuts, labelled in biro with a post-it that read “the BEST night feed snack”. Like all titbits of new parent wisdom, I devoured it hungrily and ordered another sack of unsulphured apricots on the internet. She was totally right. Who knew?

Another friend drove us home from the hospital the day after she was born, because we couldn’t drive and we didn’t fancy our chances with a newborn and a caesarean wound in an Uber. When we got out of the car, she handed me a tin of Ambrosia rice pudding and a little plastic bag full of rose petals and spices – “to Ottolenghi it up a bit” – before I winced my way up the stairs, into our flat and our unknowable future. I cried as I ate it, because the sweet, creamy blandness was precisely the nourishment I needed. But then, I cried at everything that week.

It was my birthday four days after hers, and my parents arrived with a Colin the caterpillar. A day later I ate the face – every birthday girl’s privilege – sitting outside a coffee shop in the watery January sunshine, to celebrate leaving the house for the first time and passing, barely, our first midwife weigh-in. I was dizzy with sleep deprivation, dizzy with worry that she’d lost 10% of her birth weight, dizzy with relief that they hadn’t taken her back and called us unfit parents. No hunk of sugar and cocoa butter has ever tasted quite so medicinal. I ate Colin’s face so that she could too.

There is a particular, cyclical weirdness to eating and drinking while a new person eats and drinks from you. Anyone who has breastfed will know that the moment the baby latches on, your mouth becomes a desert and your stomach a vast, gnawing canyon. It was my husband’s job to keep me fed and hydrated, a role he took seriously – glad, I think, of some way to step up that was clear and tangible; that had written instructions. He spent the final weeks of my pregnancy learning to make porridge and scrambled eggs, both foods he hates, so that he could deliver them to me on demand. Even now, nearly a year after I stopped feeding, if he comes across my water bottle in the house he will top it up without asking. Our daughter also had bottles from about three weeks in, and so making up the formula became his personal domain. He tended to his craft with all the devotion of a barista and one of those conical flasks of Colombian pour-over. If you handed me a box of Aptamil now, I wouldn’t have the first clue.

But alongside all the meals I didn’t have to make, there were also the meals I couldn’t make. I had no idea how much I relied on cooking as a source of relaxation, fulfillment, identity, even, until I no longer had the time and the free hands to do it. Suddenly I was daydreaming about recipes more convoluted than anything I’d ever cooked in the before times. I pined for a life where I could take the time to gently sweat an onion.

About three weeks in, I became determined to make soup. I was craving something brothy and restorative, with cabbage and beans and ideally half a loaf of bread all mushed into it. “But we have soup,” he said. “Not this soup,” I said. If I did nothing else with my day beyond feeds and nappy changes, I was going to make my brothy beany bready soup, damnit. And I did. Sweating more than the onion, because my postpartum thermo-regulation hadn’t settled yet, and adding so much rosemary that the whole thing tasted like Radox, I made the soup, to prove to myself I still could. And once I discovered the joy of baby wearing, by which I really mean the joy of snacking over her head, an eternal game of ‘cradle cap or pastry flakes?’ began.

Gradually, of course, the fog lifted and the food stopped arriving. After a couple of months we started having to buy and cook our own dinners again (my enthusiasm waned), and we’d exhausted all the back episodes of House of Games on iPlayer. But new food rituals arrived to take their place. Toasties after baby sensory, quiche after rhyme time. Cheesecake from the deli-cum-wine-bar round the corner. A survey of all the almond croissants in a two-mile radius, which really kicked off around the time of the four month sleep regression. We both became fanatical about giant white Toblerones – me a triangle at a time, snaffled before crawling into bed at 8pm; him the whole thing, dipped lengthways into his tea like a psychopath.

Then the seasons shifted and suddenly it was possible to sit in beer gardens and cafe courtyards and cross legged in the park on a blanket, letting melty sticks flake across our knees like confetti. There were courgette muffins and carrot fritters and homemade oaty bars, leaden with good intentions. A rainbow of pouches. Her first ice cream, and second – it’s fine, it’s mostly milk! – and the realisation that not only is nobody bringing you snacks anymore; you must now take them everywhere.

And then the years shifted and suddenly it’s possible to go to the pub on a whim and choose something from the kid’s menu, with an outside chance she might eat it. She’ll be two this week, and there’s a garish cake on order, and I’ve just remembered I need to do yet another Tesco shop and find out where in our new town stocks haggis.

She probably won’t touch it – it isn’t pasta or blueberries, after all – but we’ll tell her it’s tradition. A taste of the first life she knew, and time ours started anew.