Re: [CH] chile heat article

danceswithcarp (dcombs@bloomington.in.us)
Mon, 04 Sep 2000 22:06:48 -0500 

At 04:41 PM 9/4/00 -0500, Tom F. Bryant wrote:



>Can cap make a blister?
>
>Carp, ever heard of "Hunan Hand"? Sure! Cap can work on any skin, although
>you don't "taste" it except from the burn-pain receptors.

Of course I've heard of Hunan Hand.  I'm married.   I've heard about it in 
anger.

I'm not talking about just giving a burning or a numbing sensation; the 
article specifically said cap can raise a blister.  I've never had one 
anywhere from chiles and I've downed just about every super-hot on the 
market, including Red Savinas grown from Jim Campbell The Oneth's 
stock.  It would seem to me that I'd be getting blisters somewhere from 
that.  I do have a chronic dermatitis inflammation in my nether regions 
that comes and goes depending not on chiles but peanut and coffee 
oils...um, do you really want to know this much about me?

Never mind.

But this is kind of like the conversations I've been having with local 
tomato growers lately (our crop again is a disaster due to all of the rain 
and wet of July and August, so I've been mooching tomatoes).   In my 
misspent youth a tomato slice and mayonaise sandwich was a summer 
staple.  The tomatoes were so hhigh in acid they'd make us break out in 
fever blister like thingies or maybe we'd get blisters in our mouths and 
the mouth skin would peel.  These symptoms were caused by acids.

Chiles don't got no acids like that.  So how could you get a 
blister?  Maybe it's folklore?

Which, all of this now reminds me of the hottest thing I ever ingested as a 
youth.  Me and some other 17-18 year olds had the contract to clean the 
local Ponderosa Steakhouse after closing.  We had to use this heavy-duty 
alkaline-lye kind of industrial soap to mop with that came out ofa barrel 
with this puny little hand-pump.  One night I was starting to pump and I 
overwirked the sucker and it broke.  Not to be dissuaded from my mission I 
got a length of hose and decided I would siphon the soap into the mop 
bucket.  So I stuck the hose into the barrel and gave a mighty suck.

Whoa.  Dude.  I got a mouthful of that stuff and it was like, well, 
drinking raw lye.  I immediately started gagging and spitting out whole 
gobs of the white skin that lines your mouth.  Man, that skin was hanging 
off of my lips like drool and I was gasping for air and thinking I was 
going to Hell for sure and this was just the first step of burning.   One 
of my buds, aghast that I was in such torment and was making such odd 
strangling noises decided that he would apply the only first aid he knew how.

So here we are in a Ponderosa Steakhouse with unlimited quantities of base 
like milk or milkshake mix and my pal decides that the best way to 
neutralize an alkaline substance is to give me an equal amount of acid, so 
he shoved a raw LEMON into my teeth.   Wow.  I'd already lost the 
protective skin layer in my mouth and all of those nerve endings are just 
sort of like exposed in there and that ferking lemon juice hit those nerves 
and I just kind of went ballistic, knocking crap out of the way, screeching 
and plowing through all of the other buddies who where watching...

I made it to the Emergency Room drooling mouth-skin all over the place and 
spitting and I couldn't talk and the danged nurses and doctors weren't 
nearly so panicked about it all as I was and when they finally understood 
what happened they started LAUGHING and telling me the Lemon Home Remedy 
was the funniest story to come into the E-Room in a long time.

Even now *I* don't see the humor in it.

But all in all it was a positive experience.  I'd rate the taste as about 
the equivalent of Dave's Insanity Sauce.  The heat was maybe Backdraft.



carp