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Iceland Moss Jelly
Wash four ounces of Iceland moss in warm water, and having drained it set it over the fire in a quart of cold water. Stir until it boils, when it should be covered up and allowed to simmer for an hour. Add four ounces of sugar, a gill of sherry, the juice of two lemons, the rind of half a lemon, and the white of an egg whisked with half a gill of cold water; stir the jelly until it boils, and strain through a flannel bag. This moss is considered efficacious in cases of debility and chest complaints, but its bitter taste renders it disagreeable to many.
An invalid-cookery jelly built on the gelling starch of a lichen rather than on gelatine. It behaves less like a moulded jelly and more like a thick, faintly bitter cordial that stiffens as it cools.
- The hinge: strain while scalding hotLichenin sets as it cools, so the jelly must go through the flannel bag the moment it comes back to the boil. Let it slack off and it will clog the cloth and refuse to pass.
- Iceland moss is a lichen, not a mossCetraria islandica, sold dried by herbal suppliers rather than grocers. Buy it from a food or herb source; foraged lichen collects airborne metals and is easily confused with related species.
- About that bitternessThe book admits the taste puts people off. The bitterness is generally attributed to cetraric and related lichen acids; the traditional fix was repeated changes of water, sometimes with a little soda, before the warm-water wash called for here.
- A gillIn a British book of this date a gill is a quarter of a pint, 5 fl oz or about 150 ml. The sherry is therefore a generous slug and the egg-white liquid about 75 ml.
- Quantities in metric4 oz moss is about 115 g, which is a very large volume of dried lichen; 4 oz sugar is about 115 g; a quart is 1.1 litres, reducing over the hour's simmer.
- The egg white does two jobsWhisked with cold water and brought up to the boil, it coagulates and traps the fine lichen debris, so the flannel yields a clear liquid. Do not skip it unless you are content with a cloudy jelly.
- Set is unreliableLichen starch gives a soft, sometimes only syrupy set that varies with the batch and with how hard you boiled it. Expect something spoonable rather than a jelly you can turn out of a mould.
- Yield and keepingSomewhere under a litre depending on how much reduces, four to six invalid-sized servings. With the sherry and lemon it will keep several days covered in the refrigerator; it thickens further overnight.
Iceland moss earned its place in nineteenth-century sickroom cookery because it did two things at once: it thickened liquids like arrowroot or sago, and it carried a reputation as a demulcent for coughs and wasting illness. The lichen was a genuine famine food in Iceland and northern Scandinavia, dried, debittered and ground into flour or boiled into porridge with milk, and European pharmacopoeias listed it through the 1800s as lichen islandicus. Its supposed efficacy in "chest complaints" is traditional rather than demonstrated, and the compiler's closing remark about the bitter taste is candid for the genre: invalid dishes were judged first on whether the patient would swallow them. The sherry and lemon here are doing exactly that work, masking a flavour the book knows is hard to like.