I have an odd food intolerance thing I’m trying to work out, and I thought I would ask you all for advice with it.
My husband, G, seems to be intolerant of chicken soup. He does not react to chicken, “better than bouillon”, celery, carrots, onions, garlic powder, or black pepper in any other combinations, or to the flour, egg, baking powder, salt, and almond milk in the dumplings.
I thought it might be his lactose intolerance, but switching to non-dairy milk didn’t help. He does have Oral Allergy Syndrome, so I made sure to cook the vegetables very well (it’s soup! I cooked them until they were soft!).
Am I missing any variables? It almost seems psychosomatic to me at this point, but I can’t very well double-blind test his reactions to mystery soup, and I’m sick of only making soup when he has the next day off, so he can haunt the bathroom.
The one thing I’d wonder about is the celery- my brother is allergic and no one really noticed until we realized he got sick everytime we had chicken and dumplings.
The heat of cooking stuff together will sometimes create new chemical complexes that were not present in the stand alone foods. There may not be one thing that causing it but several in combination when heated. And yes psychological reactions are a large component of some allergies, teasing out where one ends and the other begins may be impossible.
As a side note there are a gazillion soups out there. What not just avoid chicken soup?
I was diagnosed with IBS before discovering it’s a gluten intolerance. I never seemed to react in an IBS way to just eating say, crackers. But if I tried to eat chicken noodle soup, I’d have a huge reaction. It seems that for me, the gluten in combination with certain other things causes one reaction (IBS-like reactions), while gluten on its own not in combination with those other things causes another reaction. This isn’t to say he has a gluten problem at all, just that sometimes just isolating one ingredient doesn’t get you to the heart of the problem because a set of reactions can be because of the way specific foods interact with a specific digestive tract.
Or, could it be the concentration? He normally gets X amount of onion, but gets 2X onions in this soup?
Maybe the black pepper getting boiled for a long time releases something that’s irritating? One notable poster here has bad digestive issues with black pepper.
Just to be clear, is this homemade chicken soup? And do you know of any other soups that he does or does not react to? What’s the nature of the reaction? The ingredients you’ve tested with him; were they raw or cooked when he didn’t react to them?
If it is commercial bouillion it may be in the ‘natural flavors’ which in some brands can be mushroom powder for the umami. [other brands use yeast extract for the umami]
I found this out because when I moved out and first was on my own, I used some bouillion and had an allergic reaction to it that put me in the ER.
Always be twitchy around commercial products - some things can have hidden allergens like gluten, lactose, fruits or vegetables and dyes or preservatives and not mention them because of various countries labeling laws.
I have sulfite sensitivity and your soup would give me a reaction, whereas just a few of the ingredients alone would not.
Since this is about guessing about a medical condition, rather than the recipe per se, moved to IMHO (from Cafe Society).
It may be that he has hit upon a polite way of saying that the taste of your soup is just not to his liking.