In The Fourth Trimester, we ask parents: What meal nourished you after welcoming your baby? This month, it’s a savory-meets-sweet soup from Taiwan-based cookbook author Clarissa Wei.
In Taiwan, where I live, the postpartum recovery period is taken very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it is customary to outsource the first month of care to licensed professionals. Many Taiwanese women who give birth for the first time either check into an all-inclusive postpartum hotel or hire an at-home nanny. When I gave birth to my son last fall, I chose the former.
Every day for 30 days, I had three hot meals delivered straight to my room—a nutritionally balanced tray of protein (usually pork, chicken, or fish), white rice, steamed leafy greens, and multiple soups. The soups were the most generously portioned and came steeped with herbal medicine. He shou wu, a dried root, imparted a dark-chocolate-like hue to pork broth. Ginger gave a kick to golden, glistening chunks of chicken. Long spears of astragalus root added a licorice aroma that filled the room. Bright red dates and goji berries offered much-needed pops of color. Eucomnia, which looked like the burnt tree bark, made everything bittersweet.
My baby spent the majority of his time inside a nursery, cared for by a platoon of nurses uniformed in pastel green. Meanwhile, I was across the hall in a luxury hotel room that cost roughly $220 a night, lounging on a queen-size bed with a stunning view of the city. I had access to massage service and baby-rearing courses. The nurses were on call 24/7 and were responsible for feeding, bathing, dressing, and changing my baby. I only had one job: to rest and eat whatever they fed me.
In the Chinese-speaking world and throughout Asia, soups are a central part of postpartum recovery. It is believed that a women’s qi, or life force, is depleted while giving birth. Herbal broths can help speed up the healing process.
When I was struggling with my milk supply, the nurses doubled the amount of lactation tea that was sent to me. The hallway had a communal water cooler and miscellaneous herbal teas constantly on tap. My mom, not satisfied by the already copious amounts of herbs I was consuming, sent over bags of sheng huang tea, a common postpartum concoction—composed of angelica root, red dates, ginger, goji berries, and licorice—said to expedite recovery.
The meals were all lightly seasoned, bordering on bland. But where they lacked salt, they were rich in Chinese medicine. At first I welcomed it. Even though I couldn’t always identify the herbs in the soups, I associated the bitter earthiness of boiled roots with detox and rest. My mother and grandmother used to conjure up similar brews when someone in the family fell ill or needed an extra boost. Some of the ingredients, like cordyceps, sounded intimidating, but I subscribed to the scarcity paradigm. The more obscure something was, the more valuable it was, I reasoned.