Before commercial formula existed, babies survived on a combination of breastfeeding, wet nurses, and a surprisingly wide range of homemade food mixtures that were often nutritionally poor and sometimes dangerous. Most infants throughout history were breastfed by their mothers, but when that wasn’t possible, families turned to alternatives that carried serious risks. The story of what babies drank before formula is really a story of trial, error, and staggering infant mortality.
Breastfeeding Was the Default, but Not Universal
For most of human history, a mother’s own milk was the primary food for infants. Human milk is uniquely suited to human babies. It contains relatively low protein (about 0.8 to 1.2 grams per 100 milliliters), which is actually one of the lowest concentrations among all mammals. That low protein content is a feature, not a bug: a newborn’s kidneys can handle it without strain. The ratio of different proteins in human milk is also distinct, with a composition that forms softer, more digestible curds in an infant’s stomach compared to the milk of cows or goats.
But breastfeeding wasn’t always straightforward. Mothers died in childbirth. Some couldn’t produce enough milk. Others were too ill. And in wealthier social classes, breastfeeding was sometimes avoided entirely for cultural reasons.
Wet Nursing: The Oldest Alternative
When a mother couldn’t nurse, the most reliable substitute was another lactating woman. Wet nursing is arguably the oldest profession related to infant care, and for centuries it was a well-organized practice governed by contracts and laws. In aristocratic families across Europe, hiring a wet nurse was standard. Upper-class women often considered breastfeeding unfashionable, worried it would change their figures, or found it incompatible with the restrictive clothing styles of the era.
Wet nursing was never without controversy, though. It carried deep stigma rooted in class, ethnic, and religious tensions. In 16th and 17th century Spain, critics warned that babies could absorb a wet nurse’s character through her milk. One physician argued that “the natural purity that a man receives from his ancestors is vitiated by the milk of servant women, who are often ugly, dirty, dimwitted and dishonest.” These anxieties were often thinly veiled bigotry. During the Spanish Inquisition, concerns about “purity of blood” led to decrees forbidding Christian children from receiving milk from Jewish or Muslim women, and vice versa. The fear wasn’t medical. It was ideological.
By the 16th and 17th centuries, a growing number of physicians began urging mothers to nurse their own children, criticizing the wet nursing system both morally and medically. Still, the practice persisted well into the 1800s because the alternatives were far worse.
Pap, Panada, and Other Homemade Mixtures
For families who couldn’t afford a wet nurse or didn’t have access to one, babies were fed various homemade concoctions. The two most common were pap and panada. Pap was a semisolid mixture of flour or bread crumbs cooked in water, sometimes with milk added. Panada was similar but used cereals or bread cooked in broth instead.
These foods had almost none of the nutrients a growing infant needs. They lacked adequate fat, protein, and vitamins, and the starchy base was difficult for young babies to digest. Families also tried animal milks, most commonly from cows or goats, sometimes fed directly from a vessel or soaked into a cloth for the baby to suck on. But animal milks posed their own problems. Cow’s milk contains nearly three times the total nitrogen of human milk and has a very different protein structure, with a much higher proportion of casein. This makes it harder for an infant to digest and puts significant stress on immature kidneys. Babies fed straight cow’s milk frequently developed digestive problems, malnutrition, or both.
In some regions, families thinned animal milk with water or added sugar or honey to make it more palatable. Others fed babies wine, beer, or tea. These weren’t acts of negligence by the standards of the time. Families were simply working with what they had and what local tradition recommended.
Feeding Devices and the “Murder Bottle”
How milk or pap reached the baby mattered almost as much as what was in it. Before rubber nipples and glass bottles, caregivers used hollowed-out animal horns, ceramic vessels with spouts, or rags dipped in liquid. None of these were easy to clean.
The situation got worse in the Victorian era with the arrival of a popular bottle design that used a long rubber hose to carry milk from a glass or ceramic container to the baby’s mouth. These became known as “murder bottles,” and the name was earned. The rubber tubing was virtually impossible to sterilize, creating an ideal breeding ground for bacteria. Infections from contaminated bottles killed enormous numbers of infants. Efforts to ban the design began as early as 1897, but murder bottles were still sold through the Sears, Roebuck catalog as late as 1915.
The First Commercial Formulas
The shift toward commercial infant food began in the 1860s. In 1865, the German chemist Justus von Liebig developed what he called “Soluble Food for Babies,” a powder made from equal parts baked wheat flour and ground malt, with added potassium bicarbonate. It was designed to be mixed with milk and was one of the first products marketed specifically as infant nutrition.
Two years later, in 1867, a German-born pharmacist named Henri Nestlé launched his “farine lactée” (flour with milk) in Vevey, Switzerland. It combined cow’s milk, wheat flour, and sugar, and was specifically intended for infants who couldn’t be breastfed. Nestlé developed the product in direct response to the high infant mortality rates of the era.
These early formulas were a significant step forward in concept, but they were still crude by modern standards. They didn’t replicate the protein ratios, fat content, or micronutrients of human milk. Many babies fed exclusively on these products still developed nutritional deficiencies.
Evaporated Milk Bridged the Gap
By the 1920s and 1930s, evaporated milk became the most common base for homemade infant formula in the United States. Doctors would instruct mothers to mix evaporated milk with water and corn syrup or sugar in specific ratios. This approach had two important advantages over raw cow’s milk: the heat processing involved in making evaporated milk reduced bacterial contamination, and it also altered the protein structure in a way that made softer, easier-to-digest curds in a baby’s stomach.
Evaporated milk formulas weren’t nutritionally complete. Babies fed this way often needed supplemental vitamins, particularly vitamin C, to avoid deficiency diseases like scurvy. But the approach was cheap, widely available, and considerably safer than the alternatives that had come before. Evaporated milk remained a standard infant feeding method in many households well into the 1950s and 1960s, even as commercially prepared formulas gradually improved and became more accessible.
Why So Many Babies Died
The history of infant feeding before modern formula is inseparable from the history of infant mortality. In many European cities during the 18th and 19th centuries, the death rate among infants fed without breast milk was staggeringly high. The causes were layered: the food itself lacked essential nutrients, the containers used to deliver it harbored deadly bacteria, and the understanding of hygiene was minimal. Families often didn’t know that milk left at room temperature for hours could become toxic, or that a rubber tube rinsed in water wasn’t actually clean.
The gradual improvement in infant survival over the 20th century came not from any single invention, but from the convergence of better nutrition science, pasteurization, sterilization practices, and eventually the development of formulas engineered to approximate the specific composition of human milk. Each of these steps addressed a different piece of the problem that families had been struggling with, often fatally, for centuries.