The last time I was eating Maryland Crab Soup, I was told to hurry up and finish before an electrical storm came. Apparently this soup goes sour during storms. As a native Marylander, I’ve never seen this occur, but was wondering if there was any truth to it, and if so, why? Thanks.
-Deege
no
Sounds like a variation on the old wive’s tale that thunder sours milk.
Doesn’t happen then, and doesn’t happen to soup.
Maryland crab soup is made with canned tomatoes, or tomato sauce, so it’s already sour (acidic). How could it “go sour” during a thunderstorm?
Those who say “no” are practicing pseudoscience. Based on which evidence do they make their decision? They’ve tested the claim? Or are they giving speculations but making them sound like statements of fact? A scientist would say that it SOUNDS like an old wive’s tale, so don’t believe it without evidence (but don’t DISbelieve it either, or again you’ve made a decision based on no evidence.)
Take a look at this website. Someone was intrigued by the old wives’ tale and tested it. Apparantly a thunderstorm DOES curdle milk:
http://www.newscientist.com/lastword/answers/320weather.jsp?tp=weather3
Why should this occur? UV light from lightning? Loud noises? I like the explanation on that site: Pulses of ELF high voltage cause coalescence of proteins in the milk. The milk curdles and separates, but doesn’t actually turn sour. This would be analogous to UV causing epoxy to polymerize. It should be easy to test this theory: simulate a thunderstorm; expose milk to the E-fields surrounding a VandeGraaff machine while sparks are jumping.
Other sites which mention this:
bbeaty:
The OP’s question was whether Maryland crab soup could go sour due to a thunderstorm.
Recipe via Meal-Master ™ v8.05
Title: MARYLAND CRAB SOUP
Categories: Soups/stews
Yield: 1 Recipe
4 c Water
2 12 oz cans tomatoes,
-minced
1/2 lg Onion, chopped
2 Carrots, sliced
1 cn Sweet corn
1/2 lb String beans, cut into
-1 inch pieces
1 Hot pepper, minced
Old Bay seasoning, to
-taste
1 lb Crabmeat
Put everything but the crabmeat into a large pot and bring to a boil. Cover
and simmer, adding crabmeat, for about 2 hours . . .
As Duck Duck Goose pointed out, none of these ingredients can curdle or go sour. We don’t need the scientific method to deduce that the answer to the question is no.
bbeaty said
And those letters to the editor were science? :rolleyes:
BITE YOUR TONGUE!!!
My soul, woman, no self-respecting Merlinner would EVER use canned tomatoes in MCS!! That’s like using powderd eggs to make Hollandaise sause!!!
We can discount Hoops’ posted recipe, as Meal-Master is definately not within 100 miles of the Chesapeake Bay!
Why you both outta post a “I was just joking – hee-hee” reply real soon. Especially before WeirdDave gets here.
What you inlanders don’t realilze is that we Merlinners practically worship our crabs and MCS is practically the crabs’ gift to us. Heck, most crabs are honored to be made into MCS. They sing songs about it. They have pictures on their mantle pieces of long gone relatives who were made into MCS. Their religion states that when you die you go to MCS if you were a good crab and to Deviled Crab if you were bad. (Their purgatory is like a crab-cake that is too wet and too big and won’t brown nicely in the hot oil but keeps falling apart.)
We create MCS to be the best place for crabs to be in their afterlife.
As to the thunderstorm thing, we all know that crabs hit the bottom of the bay during thunder storms. Similarly, the crab meat will sink to the bottom of the MCS. This is not good for the crab and not good for the person eating the soup.
As you were.
A friend of a friend was sitting at an outdoor table at a restaurant in Balty-more one summer, when a thunderstorm came up all over sudden. She was eating crab soup, and a bolt of lightning hit the table next to her, knocking her off her chair, and causing the soup to explode. Her hair was singed and she had a broken arm (plus bits of crab soup all over her blouse.) So, there’s actual evidence that it’s dangerous to eat Maryland Crab Soup during a thunderstorm. She didn’t curdle, though.
[
Ouch!
As it happens, I am a Merlinner, born and raised in Glen Burnie, MD (but don’t hold that against me).
I just copied from Watson (this is a Mac OSX app that taps internet databases) what seemed to be a generic recipe for Maryland crab soup.
See ya on the stoop!
Thanks for makin’ me laugh, hon!
I’ll say “hey” to all them Glemburnie fokes fer youse. 
Hmmm… loud noises and lightnin’ curdling my crab. Mmmm… crab soup.
[Judy Tenuta voice] *“Well… it could’a happened” * [/Judy Tenuta voice]
You do have a point in a highly entertaining, frowsy haired (I blame the VandeGraaff generator) hand waving, quasi-posivitist sort of way. The answer is still “no”. None of the phenomena you mention have the required energy in the proximity of fine dining to curdle proteins without your proteins being curdled as well.
[Judy Tenuta voice] *“Well… it could’a happened” * [/Judy Tenuta voice]
It’s not just science, it’s pseudo-science!
Apostate! Shame, shame on you… “canned tomatoes”, indeed. Sheesh! 
“to go sour” in this context would be “to get spoiled” and not “to turn acidic”, so yes, even things containing tomatoes may become spoiled.
Large pots of soup prepared for parties may go “off” when you leave them out of the refrigerator for an afternoon or put them into the refrigerator before the soup is fully cooled. Maybe there is a relation…
You make a mistake that many non-scientists make: using theory to reject evidence. That’s backwards thinking (a priori reasoning). The power of science is based on using EVIDENCE to reject THEORY. A famous phrase from Faraday makes this point: when there’s an argument regarding how nature works, “Let the Experiment be made.”
Also, a large facet of scientific progress is based NOT on reason, but on observation of anomalies. Isaac Asimov says it well:
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it!) but ‘That’s funny…’
- Isaac Asimov
Milk being affected by thunderstorms is certainly “funny” in just this way. The effect has no obvious, reasonable cause. It’s therefore interesting.
The website with the “thunderstorm milk experiment” points out that the milk apparently DID NOT GO SOUR. Instead it congealed. An inobservant person would reason that, since milk congeals when acid is added, therefore if milk congeals, it must be caused by acid (the milk went “sour.”) That’s faulty reasoning. And futhermore, if no acid is added, then the milk cannot congeal. More faulty reasoning.
This is another logical fallacy. Ad hominem! Attempting to attach a stigma to an opponent. Using correct arguments is much more powerful (and more impressive to informed onlookers.) When someone starts using the “stigmatize-and-dismiss” ploy, it says more about themselves than it says anything about their opponent’s argument.
Now THAT’S a good argument. (Heh, I used it myself, so it must be good!)
But consider this: if you blow two bubbles then place them in contact, because of surface-energy considerations they don’t coalesce, but if you bring an electrified object nearby, they coalesce instantly. Yet if you bring an electrified object near your body, it doesn’t harm you. My point? Perhaps a thunderstorm has effects at the macro level, and can coalesce the colloidal protein clusters in the way that a charged object can coalesce two soap bubbles. The ELF pulse from lightning obviously does not qualify as “ionizing radiation” (it does not create molecular bonds.)
However, if I go out and expose some milk to some 100KV low frequency pulses, and the milk DOESN’T coalesce, that would support the idea that the original claim is an old wive’s tale and the published experiment is simply a hoax.
If you say the above, it implies that you don’t know what science is. When a bunch of people start arguing over whether some phenomenon is genuine, or whether it’s an old wive’s tale, what would a scientist do? Perform the experiment! Perhaps you don’t trust the report, and imagine that it’s a hoax? Could be. Or perhaps the real problem is that you don’t like the result. If the person below found that the milk remained UN-curdled, I suspect you’d applaud their experiment as proper science.
**http://www.newscientist.com/lastword/answers/320weather.jsp?tp=weather3
“I read with interest the replies to the query about milk curdling during thunderstroms. The explanations offered–that the warm, humid conditions during storms encourage bacterial growth thereby souring the milk–do not explain the phenomenon that I observed. Intrigued by the original question, I decided to test it myself and deliberately left a covered glass of fresh, pasteurised milk taken straight from the fridge on the back doorstep during a thunderstorm. Within 15 minutes the milk in the glass had separated into a clear whey-like layer overlaying a layer of curd. Tasting the remixed milk confirmed that it had not turned sour, only curdled.
The remaining milk in the bottle from which the glass was filled had been kept in the fridge and remained unaffected. Why was this?” Val Dawson, Amersham Buckinghamshire **
Unfortunately I live in Seattle, where there are about two thunderstorms per year, so I’ve never tried the experiment myself. However, if I can collect enough ambition, I can try using a layer of milk as the dielectric in a capacitor and applying a 100KV pulse to it (with some PE film on the metal to prevent electrolysis from playing a role.)
I hang my head in pseudo-shame for attempting to pin the braying, donkey tail of stigma on your powerful and persuasive arguments for crab soup curdling.
Originally posted by samclem - "And those letters to the editor were science?
Ummm chips - check, ice tea - check, lawn chair-check. Ahhhhh… it’s great to be alive!
The argument presented for milk curdling during a thunderstorm has nothing to do with the soup; moreover, the terms being used are veritably undefined.
“Curdled”? What does that mean? The phenomenon described in the quoted material is milk separating. Milk’s normal state is separated; only when inside a cow or after homogenization is milk not separated. The author also describes “curds”; does he actually mean that the casein was denatured? Did he check? Does he even know what that means?
Regardless of what happens to milk, there is nothing of the kind that can happen to the described soup; it contains no hydrophobic ingredients, nothing that must be emulsified, no protein that is not entrapped within the crab, no protein that hasn’t been thoroughly denatured by cooking. So the experiences of the milk are irrelevant except as an object lesson. Point taken.
Here’s one for you: without a definition of what phenomena constitute “the soup going ‘off’,” no objective observation can be made as to whether the predicted phenomenon occurred or did not. As with most pseudoscientific pursuits, any positive observation could be claimed as a positive result. If it’s simply a matter of “it tastes different,” this could as easily be an effect on the observer as on the soup.
That, in fact, is my hypothesis. Many are familiar with the smell of an approaching storm, and the acrid odor that prevails during the storm. This acrid odor is likely to make everything taste a little off. Perhaps there is something unique to the chemistry of crab soup that makes it particularly susceptible to this subjective phenomenon; it would not surprise me if the bitter and metallic elements of the tomatoes’ flavor (for example) became more noticeable at such a time.
Of course, that presupposes that there is any need for a theory; without observations, we don’t need to explain anything.
Ummm, y’know, all the arguements about thunderstorms and milk are interesting and all, but in your rigouous persuit of the truth, you’ve overlooked one teensy, weensy, itty-bitty fact.
Maryland Crab Soup dosen’t contain any milk.
Now, what exactly is the point of arguing about milk?
See ya downy ocean, hon!
What is this “old wive” what’s tale is being pulled? 