YO MAMA: Burn, baby, burn

OPINION

Sometimes, I swear my husband strategically asks me questions when he knows I am too distracted to answer properly. Like when I am in the middle of stopping the kid from climbing into the fireplace.

“Hey, if I put a little habanero pepper in the curry the kid can still eat it… right?”

My husband is a hot sauce fanatic. I’m pretty sure he’s burned off a layer of taste buds because he can tolerate spicier food than anyone I know. It’s an unfair advantage — this tongue cauterization — because he can challenge you to eat a hot pepper and downplay its heat by popping one in his own mouth like candy.

“See, it’s not that bad,” he says, breathing pure mace into your face.

He’d been trying to indoctrinate the kid into the world of hot sauce since our son started solids around six months old. Now, I enjoy my hot sauce too, and we both want our son to be a “good eater”. None of that picky eating crap. I’d already flooded his food with turmeric, curry powder, cumin, paprika and other spices I was convinced would magically turn him into a foodie. But hot peppers? I was skeptical. The kid wasn't even a year old yet, was he ready for the world of hot sauce?

What if it backfired and turned him OFF spicy food? Would he be traumatized forever, unable to eat a dish without first asking, with trepidation, “is it spicy?” 

We’d gotten into some very scientific hot pepper debates, my husband and I. Biologically, I was worried that our son’s digestive tract was too delicate to handle the peppers. What if it burned his insides and he began pooping acid?

My husband countered that parents around the world introduced their youngsters to spicy dishes all the time. Their children didn't burst into flames. This did seem like pretty sound logic. But how, and when, did these parents do it, I wondered? Gradually, a little bit at a time? Or did they wait until a certain age? Were the babies already accustomed to it, from drinking their mother’s spicy amniotic fluids pre-birth?

There is no decent research that I can find on introducing babies to spicy food. The entire scientific community has failed to investigate this most pressing issue. I understand that subjecting tiny babies to offensively hot peppers might be just a tad unethical but WILL SOMEONE PLEASE STUDY THIS SOMEHOW?! Inquiring minds need to know (and more importantly, spousal debates need to be resolved.)

I admit, I’d been a bit edgy about the whole thing ever since an incident a couple weeks earlier where my husband had been cooking up a batch of hot sauce. I came downstairs and it was like our kitchen had been mustard-gassed. The baby was in the next room, playing in his exersaucer.

“GET THAT HOT SAUCE OUT OF HERE YOU ARE GOING TO BLIND OUR SON,” I cried.

“He’s fine,” came the nonchalant response.

The kid did seem fine. He was sneezing a bit, but seemed otherwise content. I took him outside anyway, where he tried to eat some dead leaves and dirt.

“See,” I said. “He’s all messed up from the hot pepper fumes. He doesn’t know what food even is anymore.”

At some point, I declared black pepper and powdered ginger Mom Approved Spices. I figured it would slowly build his tolerance to spicy foods. My husband, on the other hand, did not believe black pepper and ginger qualified as hot and had been trying to sneak hot peppers into our food for awhile. At eight months the kid pretty much ate what we ate, which was great, but it also meant that we had to tone down our dishes — and serve the hot sauce on the side.

All of this ran through my brain at lightning-speed as I picked up the kid and bolted into the kitchen to intercept my husband from impulsively tossing a bunch of habaneros into the curry. I caught him as he was about to scrape the offending peppers off the chopping board and into the pot.

“I’m not sure he’s ready,” I said. “And I really want him to eat this curry. He threw most of his lunch on the floor and ate some lint he found instead.”

As we stood there in a deadlock, the kid did a twist-and-lunge toward the counter and grabbed a fistful of raw, minced garlic, which he stuffed into his mouth without a second thought. My husband and I froze and waited for his reaction.

He didn’t spit it out. His eyes didn’t even water. It was a lot of garlic. If you think of a baby’s size relative to a grown man, the ratio of cloves to body mass equalled garlic-eating-contest proportions.

No, it wasn’t a hot pepper, but raw garlic definitely burns.

The kid looked up at me with his enormous blue eyes and laughed in my face.

His breath was even worse than his father’s.

— Charlotte Helston gave birth to her first child, a rambunctious little boy, in the spring of 2021. Yo Mama is her weekly reflection on the wild, exhilarating, beautiful, messy, awe-inspiring journey of parenthood.

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