Wave 1 | Prompt 9 (Wild Card): A myth about food
Type: Myth
For most of the Summer Camp event, I really had no idea what to write for a myth about food. However, a few days after the final wave of prompts were revealed, I came up with Bleeding Sun Hot Sauce.
Bleeding Sun is a dragon species I came up with a long time ago when my friends and I wanted to make our own video games, along with the Shadescale species.
I was stocking the frozen department at work when I saw the Tie Pei logo on their frozen spicy chicken meals. Their little dragon logo made me think about some kind of hot sauce that people would think can’t be consumed by humans, only dragons. While I was on break, I wrote this down and thought the Bleeding Sun species would be a good fit for the name.
Bleeding Sun Hot Sauce, named after the fierce dragon species known for its fiery breath, is an exceptionally potent and spicy condiment. Initially believed to be suitable only for consumption by dragonkin and deemed unsafe for humans, it has now been proven that this hot sauce is not limited to draconian palates.
The intensely fiery hot sauce is meticulously crafted using a rare and exceptionally potent pepper. This extraordinary pepper is sourced from a cactus native to the harsh and arid environment of the Duskfire Desert.
Known for its intense heat and distinctive flavor, the pepper is inedible for humans in its raw form, making it a unique and challenging ingredient to work with. Interestingly, this pepper is a favorite food of Bleeding Sun dragons, who are seemingly immune to its fiery properties. This natural resistance to the pepper's intense heat has made it an integral part of the diet of these remarkable creatures.
I was trying to think what exactly would make this hot sauce “inedible” for humans, and a pepper came to mind. After deciding some special kind of pepper is used in the hot sauce, I immediately thought it would come from a cactus found in the edges of the Duskfire Desert.
The origin of the myth about the inedibility of the hot sauce stemmed from the use of a particular pepper that is typically considered inedible for humans. This pepper, however, is roasted prior to being incorporated into the sauce. This roasting process effectively eliminates some of the harmful chemicals present in the pepper, rendering it safe for human consumption.
The pepper, in its raw form, is inedible by humans. It contains harmful substances, like some kind of acid or something, alongside a capsaicin-like chemical. I don’t know if any actual peppers in the real world are like this where then cooking or roasting them makes them safe to eat. It’s just the first thing that came to mind while writing about this myth.
In contrast, dragonkin have no issues consuming this pepper in its raw form, contributing to the misconception that the hot sauce was unsuitable for human consumption. As soon as the public became aware of the fact that the harmful substances in the pepper are cooked off during the roasting process, the hot sauce gained popularity as a condiment for various foods.
I could see that people probably didn’t know that the pepper was cooked beforehand, which led to misconceptions about the sauce. A friend of mine didn’t know that alcohol gets cooked off when you use wine or whatever while cooking meals, so people thinking they used the raw pepper in the sauce is definitely something that would happen.
Still an extremely spicy hot sauce, though.