In Hot Water with Blood Stains

Have you ever wondered why you are not supposed to wash a blood stain with hot water?  I remember being told when I was younger that if one should get blood on one's clothing to use cold water and never hot.  Of course, they were right, but I never understood why, and I found the answer without even looking.


Shortly after getting married, my mother gave me a giant box filled with cookbooks.  Many had been previously owned by my grandmother.  In that box was a book entitled LET'S COOK IT RIGHT by Adelle Davis .  In the chapter two, "You Need Have No Failure in Cooking Meats" it reads:
     "When meats are cooked at high temperatures, the heat causes the proteins to contract, shrivel, and become hard, dry and tough,  The effect of heat is usually seen in bacon fried until crisp...the lean meat is so hard and dry that if it were thick, it would not be edible."

What does cooking meat have to do with removing blood stains?  What do meat and blood have in common?  Proteins!  So, if the proteins in the bacon "contract, shrivel, and become hard, dry and tough" when over heated, then logic would assume that the same occurs in the blood proteins.  Have you ever noticed the way that a blood stain becomes set and nearly impossible to remove after a cycle in the dryer?  Is it just blood?  What other stains might have proteins in them?

I love how principles from one area of the home can be applied to another!  With this principle in mind rather than relying simply upon the Law of "no hot water for blood" we can apply it to situations that perhaps we did not think had a connection.

                                                               


Copyright October 2010