Hot Soup!

"Excuse me Miss. This soup is cold!"

We used to have a restaurant. For the last couple years that we owned it, it was open for lunch as well as dinner. We would get business people in their suits and skirts, shoppers that would wander down from the Front Street shopping district and tourists from the hotel across the street.

And we got old ladies. Groups of old ladies. Very pleasant old ladies. That is until you served them soup.

The soup was made in the kitchen and then brought (while it was fresh and hot) out to the server’s station to be kept in the double boiler. Same routine every day. Same temperature every day. The only thing that varied daily was the soup du jour.

These ladies, sometimes in groups of twelve or sixteen, as they liked to play Bridge for a little while during their meal, would all order soup. And they all complained. “This soup is cold.”

It was hot, trust me. It was steaming and nobody else ever complained that it wasn’t heated to their liking. These complaints resulted in the server reheating sixteen bowls of soup in the microwave one or two at a time. And of course, this prolonged the time and created more complaints because they could not all partake of their soup at the same time. Lord forbid that some of them finished their hot soup before the others.

But…… Now that it’s been a few years, I’m starting to think those old ladies weren’t that batty after all. I honestly don’t think it was their fault that they felt the soup was not hot.

See, I found the perfect soup crock for my office. It perfectly fits a can of soup and it has a rubber, vented lid – perfect for the microwave! And it’s a really pretty sunshine yellow. Almost as golden as the sodium-filled
noodle soup I just ate.

So I’ve been bringing soup to work over the past couple of weeks, in exchange for the frozen Lean Cuisines I’ve been eating, just to change things up a bit. I pour the soup in, snap on the lid and set the microwave timer for 45 seconds. Take off the lid, stir and then heat for another 45 seconds. At this point the crock is hot to the touch and the soup is steaming. But I take off the lid again, stir and enter another 45 seconds on the timer.

So now the timer has sounded about a minute or two ago. The crock is definitely hot to the touch and I try to hold the handle so that my knuckles don’t graze the hot crock wall. I get it back to my desk and open the lid. It’s steaming like crazy! Crush up some crackers. Sprinkle them in and ….. 

First slurp? Warm. Maybe slightly more than warm. But undeniably not hot. And you just can’t stomach Butternut Squash Bisque at room temp! It’s impossible!

Which leads me to this question: Does your tongue lose sensitivity as you age?

I must be the first person to ever pose this question to Google. Because all the Google search provided was stuff like this:

     http://www.care2.com/greenliving/do-your-taste-buds-change-as-you-get-older.html

     http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/004013.htm


The links that popped up led me to articles about losing taste buds as you age, and the remaining taste buds in your mouth atrophy (or shrink). Fabulous!

Your taste of salty and sweet foods goes first. Great! Which means that you’re probably craving more salt on your foods than you have before. You may also be finding that you’re enjoying more hot and spicy foods than you did in the past because you’re having a harder time enjoying foods that are blander.

How many of you are sitting there right now going “Yep. Yep. That’s totally me!”?

Though I found no answers to my original question, I have to believe that my theory is correct. Your tongue must lose sensitivity to high-temp foods as you age. Soup made at home, set on the table and ladled into bowls seems perfectly well-heated – it more than likely just came off the stove top - and we adults are able to slurp it off the spoon without much blowing. The kids however, require sometimes up to three ice cubes before it is adequately cooled enough for them to handle.

I promise to continue my research on this ever so interesting topic. And until I can come up with some legitimate answers, I will heat my soup in four increments of 45 seconds, rather than just three. 

I guess those nice old ladies really know what they were talking about after all.

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