There’s nothing quite as gross as baby food. You know, the greenish glop in a jar that just doesn’t smell right.

It did my heart good to read in this poem that Mom believed in babies eating real food, too, even sixtysomething years ago.

The Roast Beef Baby

We moved to Pennsylvania
when you were one, about.
We slept three nights in a motel
and ate our dinners out.

Now other babies at your age
were eating out of jars:
mushed and mashed and lumpy things –
and never candy bars.

But you were the roast beef baby,
and when the waitress came
with meat and several vegetables,
you tried to say each name,

and then demolished all of it.
When you looked up to see
if we had any left at all
that you could have for free.

We gave you all the ice cream,
for you like chocolate best;
and then you found the cracker dish
and finished up the rest!

~ Joan Vayo, 1956

Mom wrote that poem for Harry, my oldest brother. He was born in eastern Massachusetts and was what the locals would call a “bustah.” When each of my boys was born, that word suddenly came back to me: Oh, what a bustah you are!

When Thomas, our first born, was little, I was happily a full-time mom. The internet wasn’t around yet, but a friend tipped me off how to find a book with recipes for baby food.

One of Tom’s favorite dishes was beets.

Once I got the hang of it, I tried more and more recipes. Little Tom smacked his lips as he enjoyed homemade pumpkin, applesauce, and acorn squash.

Then I took it too far.

The recipe for liver was so tempting, I had to give it a try. Thomas was such an enthusiast baby foodie. And liver was packed with iron, right?

My precious baby opened his little mouth trustingly and I spooned in a bit of nice, smooth liver.

It took half a second, that’s all. Those beautiful blue eyes looked up at me, first hurt and then accusingly. I’d never seen those looks from him before.

Uh-oh. Will he ever trust me again?

Next Tom opened his mouth and with a tiny hand scraped every morsel of liver off of his tongue and flung it dramatically onto the tray of his high chair.

Point taken, lad. No more liver. Promise.

Gary hates liver, too. He tells the story of how, growing up, when his farm family would get a cow slaughtered for meat, the packaged portions would be loaded into the deep freezer in the basement.

“Every few weeks, Mom would ask me to bring up a package of liver. God, I hated liver! After a few months, I just knew we had to be on the last package and that would be it for another year. But, no! There was always more. Always. I swear, it was like the loaves and fishes!”

Gary won Father of the Year for introducing Tom to yet another farm product.

Little Thomas somehow managed to forgive me. He even agreed to sit at the same table with me when we’d go out to eat years later so I could have liver and onions while pregnant with John.

But I learned my lesson. Never again did I cook liver in our house.

“The Roast Beef Baby” © 1956 Joan Vayo. All rights reserved.

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