First Month Traditions

We haven’t really been keeping up with many of the Chinese traditions that one is supposed to follow with newborns. For instance, the mother and child(ren) are not supposed to leave the house except to visit the doctor during the first month. While there is some sense to this recommendation, given that newborns that get sick and develop a fever in the first month need to be hospitalized, we tried going out several times — to Babies R Us, to the beach, and to their grandparents’ place. At the end of the first month, we’re also supposed to have some kind of official “meet the baby” gathering where we invite a bunch of people to see the new baby. Nope. Not us. A number of people have come by to visit the new babies, but we’re certainly not throwing a get-together. Call us lame.

The traditions that we have been following all have to do with food. No red meat in the first week of recovery. On the first day back from the hospital, both Agnes’ mom and mine said something about fish soup. Agnes’ mom brought over the fish. I have no idea what kind it was. It was red, had a large head and spines. I was instructed to make soup out of it by boiling it in water with ginger, tofu, scallions and two kinds of unidentified dried root. The fish floated to the surface right from the start, so I was afraid that it wasn’t cooking all the way through. To compensate, I boiled it for a really long time, and it kind of fell apart in the soup. Agnes had some of the fish. I had some of the soup. Overall, it wasn’t bad, but there were way too many fish bones.

Next was sesame chicken. Sesame chicken is supposed to be good for recovery after surgery (Agnes’ c-section). This is a whole chicken, chopped up into chunks and stewed in a broth with ginger and a lot of sesame oil. It’s served with thin somen noodles that soak up much of the soup. Agnes’ mom insists on black sesame oil. My mom prefers some kind of Japanese brand. We didn’t find Japanese black sesame oil. Fortunately, both of our mothers decided to cook this sesame chicken for us, each with their own preferred sesame oil. Over the past month, I think we had it for six or seven meals.

Third up was pork feet. For those not familiar with the dish, I’m sure it sounds gross, but it’s actually pretty good. The feet are boiled for a long time in a water, ginger, scallions and soy sauce and maybe a couple other ingredients until the cartilege in the feet soften up. There’s a lot of pork fat to flavor the broth (pork fat rules). The feet themselves have some meat, some skin (which is soft and flavorful), a bunch of fat, and bones. This is served as a meat dish along with rice and whatever else you want to eat. This dish is supposed to help aid one’s breastmilk supply. It’s not a bad dish — quite tasty. It just probably has more fat than we would normally eat.

In the broth created from cooking the pork feet, one also cooks eggs. These eggs are hard boiled first, then shelled. The eggs are then put into the soy sauce based broth which is then brought to a boil and allowed to cool two or three times. The eggs are left soaking in the broth overnight. The pork fat and the soy sauce seep into the egg, turning the white part of the hard boiled egg a light brown color and making it slightly more firm. The whole egg takes on a bit of a pork and soy sauce flavoring. We cooked a dozen of these. Then, Effy brought over another half dozen. We ended up eating them all. They’re pretty good too. No idea if they’re also supposed to increase milk supply, but it seemed to go along with the pork feet dish. Just don’t check our cholesterol this month.

The final dish that a new mother is supposed to eat is another type of fish soup. I think it was sole cooked in a soup with some kind of unidentified dried berries, the same two dried roots as in the first fish soup, ginger, scallions, and papaya. Yes, papaya. We’re not that fond of dishes that mix fruit and meat, and out of all of the fruit we do eat, we don’t really like papaya that much. Agnes had some of this dish — fish, papaya and all. I ate some of the fish.

I’m not really sure if there’s anything else coming up. It doesn’t seem like it. It hasn’t been too bad having these dishes. Most of these dishes were cooked in advance and then heated for our meals, which was very nice since it’s been hard to cook.

Anyone know if we’re done? Are there still more traditions that are coming up in the next couple of months?