A hundred-year-old cookbook recommended that the best first vegetables for a baby are strained spinach, asparagus, peas, and young carrots. I can’t remember which vegetables were introduced first when my children were young, but the Strong 4 Life site says:
Great first veggies to try:
- Pureed carrots
- Pureed squash
- Pureed broccoli
- Pureed sweet potatoes
- Pureed green beans
A Hundred Years Ago 
Strained peas – I loved them. My sister not so much. My mother painted the walls of the kitchen that color of green since it hid the stains of spit out peas for her and spinach for me…
I love the story about the paint color on the kitchen walls. Thanks for sharing.
My grandbaby has been eating all of those except maybe broccoli. Bananas are popular too.
Brocoli seems like an odd one for a first food – but ideas have changed so much since we were young.
I’m surprised to see asparagus there! Don’t automatically think of pureeing this for babies!
I’m often surprised by how many foods are pureed today for infants
I never thought of asparagus – maybe it was something that people grew in their gardens back then. A perennial that kept on giving every year. For my own kids it was lots of peas, carrots, cauliflower, broccoli and sweet potato.
It makes sense that people probably grew asparagus in their gardens a hundred years ago – and then thought about feeding it to their infants. Asparagus used to also grow wild (or semi-wild) in fence rows. I can remember a book about foraging for foods that was around when I was young called “Stalking the Wild Asparagus.”
Similar choices to the ones I made – apart from asparagus which is only in season for one month, unless you buy in from Peru, which of course I don’t. And purée seem to have gone out of the window too, according to my daughter. It’s all about getting very messy and feeding yourself!
I find it fascinating how ideas about feeding babies (and parenting in general) change from one generation to the next.
I suspect a whole lot of babies were introduced to mashed potatoes first because it was already on the table.
That’s how I did it when I was raising kids. Mashed potatoes – and applesauce – were foods I often fed my babies.