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Irish Moss
One ounce of selected Irish moss should be well washed, and then soaked in a quarter of a pint of cold water for three or four hours. Add a pint of cold milk or milk and water, boil for a few minutes, strain through fine muslin, and set aside to cool. IRISH MOSS may be flavoured with cinnamon, sugar, and lemon, or vanilla. It will set a firm jelly. It is much used by invalids suffering from pulmonary complaints.
This is carrageen blancmange — a seaweed-set milk jelly — written when it was as much a sickroom staple as a dessert. The instructions are compressed, and two details decide whether it sets or turns out slack.
- Imperial measuresA quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz (about 140 ml); a pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz (about 570 ml), so the milk is roughly four times the soaking water. US pints keep that same ratio but are smaller in absolute terms.
- What Irish moss isDried Chondrus crispus, also sold as carrageen moss — the whole washed and sun-bleached seaweed, sold in translucent pale fronds. It is not the same thing as the refined carrageenan powder used as a commercial thickener, and powder cannot be substituted measure for measure.
- "Selected" means picked over"Selected" -- probably a trade description of a picked-over grade of dried weed. Either way, dried carrageen can carry sand, shell fragments and stray bits of other weed: rinse in several changes of cold water and pull out anything dark or gritty before the long soak.
- Boil "for a few minutes" is optimisticBoil "for a few minutes" is brief -- the gelling polysaccharides leach out with heat and time, and most carrageen puddings are given a gentle simmer of 10 to 20 minutes, the pan barely bubbling and stirred now and then. Milk held that long risks catching on the base — use a heavy pan and low heat.
- Strain hot, and pressPour through fine muslin while the mixture is still hot and thin, and press the softened weed against the cloth to get the gel out of it. Once it starts to cool it will not pass a fine cloth at all.
- Flavour before it setsSugar, vanilla, or a cinnamon stick and lemon peel should go in during the simmer or immediately after straining, while the liquid is still warm and pourable. Lemon juice, if used, goes in at the end — acid weakens the set, so a strip of zest is safer than juice.
- The setAn ounce of moss to a pint of milk gives a firm, sliceable jelly rather than a wobbly cream; halve the moss if you want something spoonable. Chill at least three hours, or overnight, in a wetted mould.
- YieldAbout 1 1/4 pints of finished jelly (roughly 700 ml), less what the weed absorbs: four small moulds, or one large one. Best eaten soon, as the surface tends to weep.
Carrageen moss has been gathered off the Atlantic coasts of Ireland and Brittany for centuries, dried on the shore rocks until it bleached to a pale straw colour, and its use as a milk-setting agent long predates commercial gelatine. In the late nineteenth century it belonged as much to invalid cookery as to the dessert course: the closing line about pulmonary complaints reflects the standard Victorian view of seaweed jellies as demulcent — soothing to the throat and chest — and easy for a weak stomach, a role also given to arrowroot, isinglass and calf's-foot jelly. The name is sometimes traced, by tradition rather than by evidence, to Carragheen, near Waterford, though the weed was harvested all along the western seaboard and a competing derivation takes it from the Irish carraigín, 'little rock'. Its descendant is still with us: refined carrageenan extracted from the same species remains one of the most widely used stabilisers in commercial dairy products.