I know it happens after prepared salads to go, a wild mushroom and arugula salad from a popular restaurant in Toronto, frozen meals from M&M (a frozen meal shop in Canada), and I usually react if I have tomato or lettuce on a club sandwich or burger.
It’s been happening for close to 9 years now. I was relieved to find out I’m not allergic to shrimp or any other common food allergies, after my allergy test.
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Would you mind sharing what it is?
I know people double up on antihistamines (nasal/respiratory and stomach) and take digestive enzymes for some kinds of allergies / reactions.
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I will check (give me 72 h- this was a prescription)
Np - just curious.
I came across a list of histamine sources the one time I l had hives (and ended up with a recurrence a week later, which is when I went looking for triggers - even though an allergy panel was completely negative, the allergist told me many things never show up).
Was very helpful to me, because there were a lot of things in my normal diet that weren’t the cause, but I needed to avoid for a while that I wouldn’t have thought to (eg yogurt and other fermented foods - soy and miso included, shellfish and fish, and so on).
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I sometimes have a reaction after shellfish, but rarely at home. I wonder if it’s because I thaw them right before cooking, whereas restaurants could have been storing the shrimp thawed for quite a while.
What’s funny to me, is that I rarely have issues after shrimp at a cheap Chinese restaurant or calamari at a cheap Greek restaurant. No issues with lobster rolls anywhere.
If I order a bouillabaisse , a cioppino or a seafood pasta at an upscale restaurant, 2 out of 3 times I order it, I’ll end up with hives 3 hours later.
I would venture that there are hidden ingredients aside from the headline ones that are worse allergens in the cases where you have a reaction.
To bring this back to the thread topic, I think professional cooks have to be more careful about such hidden allergens, but they also don’t have to list them.
In bouillabaisse, it may not be the fish but the fish stock that’s causing your issue - or other additives like colatura or clam juice. A customer allergic to seafood would skip the dish entirely - but someone who doesn’t usually react to fish or shrimp might, and get bitten in the behind because of those other ingredients that are worse allergens to them.
As a home cook, I had to deal with a long list of allergies because some of my family got a comprehensive panel done just before the pandemic, in the worst timing of all time. So for any regular meal, we’d have a couple gluten free, a couple vegetarian, a couple dairy-free, and several more things (certain nuts, certain spices, soy, blah blah blah blah - it was a nightmare!)
But, in the home cooking setup, we could completely control all aspects of meal planning and preparation vs a professional who’s dealing with a lot more risk of cross-contamination because there are so many more people handling things - and potentially horrific consequences.
I try to be pretty aware when I invite people over or take food to friends’ - don’t want to sneak any “secret ingredients” like fish sauce into something that it wouldn’t obviously be in and trigger some poor soul who had no idea it was in there.
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