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Moss and Currant Jelly
This is made by boiling slowly, in the same proportions as for the first recipe, omitting the wine, and straining it on a tablespoonful or more of currant jelly, mixing it well and putting it in a mould to cool. Puddings. These are made according to the recipes hereafter given. They should be of the simpler preparations, as batter, bread, rice, arrow-root, etc., and may be baked in a proper-sized shell or cup, and eaten with cream or wine sauce. simple wine sauce is made with a little sherry and water, sweetened with soft sugar. A
This is a variation entry: it depends on a preceding recipe for moss jelly or moss blancmange that is not reproduced here, and it trails off into a general note on invalid puddings. The technique is straightforward once you know what the moss is.
- The moss is carrageen"Moss" in a sick-room chapter means Irish moss (carrageen), a dried red seaweed, not sphagnum or lichen. It is sold whole and dried in health-food and Caribbean groceries; it gels on cooling without gelatine.
- Missing proportionsThe original refers back to "the first recipe" for quantities, which is not on this page, so the ratio is genuinely unknown here. A proportion often given in period recipes is about half an ounce of dried moss, soaked and then simmered in a pint of milk or water, but no figure can be derived from this text.
- Soak before boilingDried carrageen needs fifteen minutes in cold water first, with a rinse to remove sand and shell fragments. Simmering unsoaked moss gives poor extraction and a marine taste.
- Boil slowly, and strain hotThe hinge of the recipe. Gentle simmering draws out the carrageenan without scorching, and the liquid must be strained onto the currant jelly while still hot or the jelly will not dissolve and disperse. The recipe does not say whether the base is milk or water.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, the tart preserve, not a currant-flavoured gelatine dessert. A tablespoon is the sweetening and the flavour both; taste and add more, since carrageen jelly is otherwise bland.
- Moulding and setRinse the mould in cold water before filling. Carrageen sets softer than gelatine and needs three to four hours chilled; it will not survive being unmoulded onto a warm plate.
- The wine sauce"Soft sugar" is fine-grained moist sugar; use caster or superfine. Sherry stirred into sweetened water is uncooked, so the alcohol remains, which is worth knowing before serving it to a child or an invalid.
- YieldIf the base is the pint assumed above, that is roughly four small moulds or cups; the recipe itself gives no quantity.
Carrageen jelly belongs to a long tradition of invalid cookery in which the aim was something nourishing, bland and easy to swallow rather than anything a well person would order. Irish moss was gathered along the Atlantic coasts of Ireland and later New England, dried on the shore, and sold cheaply by the ounce; it was valued as a demulcent for coughs and sore throats, and its setting power made it the poor household's gelatine at a time when calf's-foot jelly meant hours of boiling bones. The currant jelly here is doing double duty, supplying acid and sweetness to mask the faint seaweed flavour. The same seaweed is still in industrial use: the extracted carrageenan thickens ice cream and non-dairy milks on supermarket shelves today.