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She had several 5 litre bottles lined up against the living room wall. There were three different types of whiskey all home made on the farm by her Mum or other family members in the provinces.

First a fruit based whiskey. The ten fruit whiskey tasted sweet from the natural sugar from the fruit and the honey. The consistency was clear all the way down apart from slightly sloppy where the fruit lay fermented in the bottom four inches of the jar.

Why would a woman recovering from childbirth want to drink so much whiskey you ask. Well, it's common in Cambodia. A fruit whiskey will give you a 'young body' to quote to my wife. Apparently the fruit and whiskey combine to help the damaged and stretched skin to tighten again and to become more supple. Then there is a ginger based whiskey. Ginger also helps the skin and body repair. Primarily it fights infection and protects against infection. The third whiskey has scorpions in it. This one is the most potent and is the one which has more medicinal purposes. I suppose a natural paracetamol and energy source.

For the two or three weeks the new mum would have a glass of one or two of the different whiskeys every day. And she'd sleep soundly because of the high alcohol content. The grandmother looked after baby at night and suffered the sleepless nights whilst the mother had long undisturbed sleeps. The whiskey aided her recovery and helped our evenings to become merry and lots of fun.

How much whiskey was there? I'd hazard a guess at 50 litres. One expensive ingredient included was honey. Real honey, not the common imitation honey which is a much cheaper alternative. Her extended family sourced the honey from bees nests themselves. About half of the whiskey was gifts from family and the other half made by mum on the farm. If you were to purchase all the ingredients yourself a 50 litre horde would set you back 2000 dollars. That is twice the price of a basic blended supermarket Scotch in the U.K., but probably about the same mark up as a decent single malt in the U.K.

No breast-feeding then ?

As for why drink, well i guess afterwise, apart from celebrating, when you have the matrix like a cauliflower, a bit of tasty anesthesic doesn't hurt, and is well earned ?

We had a 50% ABV Blended Milk business going on.

@Phnom Penh Pal moving this topic to Cambodian Culture..

The mother-in-law was making some of that for my wife to drink. I wasn't a fan as not wanting our baby ingesting alcohol regularly through the breastmilk. My wife didn't want to drink it anyway so she could use me as an excuse and ended up giving it away. Not that I thought it was some life-endangering situation, I just preferred it not to happen.

For a start it is not "whiskey". It's rice wine infused with herbs and various roots etc. It's a tradition. My wife spent a long time in the late stages of pregnancy preparing one of these concoctions. Days spent mashing up stuff in a pestle and mortar. However, she only made one 5 lire demijohn of the stuff, and I probably drank most of it as she never cared for alcohol much.

@ Western dads. Where do you draw the line between cultures ?
The western partner of a Khmer woman will probably (rightly?) think that she should not drink alcohol - and especially homemade rice wine - if she is breast-feeding. But, the woman and her family might believe that this alcohol is good, and even essential, for the healing process after giving birth.
Would you insist that your ideas on this - health and safety - should prevail over local and family traditions ?

There are other traditions about childbirth - wearing hats, and putting mittens on baby - which are not western but do no harm, so where do you draw the line ?
I quite like the suggestions here that the dad does most of the drinking. Lol, maybe he should also wear the mittens (while he drinks...)

Anchor Moy wrote: ↑Sat Jun 12, 2021 12:36 am @ Western dads. Where do you draw the line between cultures ?
The western partner of a Khmer woman will probably (rightly?) think that she should not drink alcohol - and especially homemade rice wine - if she is breast-feeding. But, the woman and her family might believe that this alcohol is good, and even essential, for the healing process after giving birth.
Would you insist that your ideas on this - health and safety - should prevail over local and family traditions ?

There are other traditions about childbirth - wearing hats, and putting mittens on baby - which are not western but do no harm, so where do you draw the line ?
I quite like the suggestions here that the dad does most of the drinking. Lol, maybe he should also wear the mittens (while he drinks...)

I say don't interfere. As JB says, she won't drink much wine. My sister-in-law drank a bottle of Guinness every day in the West.
Mittens were routine in the West until the 1980s when they rightly declared that the risk of slight skin lesions from soft nails was well worth the tactile benefit to the baby of not wearing them. Same goes double for the bootees. The knife under the head is OK, can't be too careful with those evil spirits around and the baby needs some weaponry if mother is sleeping at the time. I say no hats for mother or baby unless there is a rare cold spell of weather.

John Bingham wrote: ↑Fri Jun 11, 2021 10:52 pm For a start it is not "whiskey". It's rice wine infused with herbs and various roots etc. It's a tradition. My wife spent a long time in the late stages of pregnancy preparing one of these concoctions. Days spent mashing up stuff in a pestle and mortar. However, she only made one 5 lire demijohn of the stuff, and I probably drank most of it as she never cared for alcohol much.

They don't just drink it, they also prepare one to rub their body with.

Was easier because my wife agreed with me. Mother-in-law had a few instances that angered me and I had to correct.

1) Tiger balm should not be used on newborns, it even says so on the bottle.

2) Leave the kid in the damned car seat, I don’t care if nobody else owns one.