Home › The Principles of Cookery › Seaweeds Used as Articles of Diet
Seaweeds Used as Articles of Diet
Amongst seaweeds which have been used as articles of diet none is better known than the Chrondrus crispus, which, under the name of carrageen moss, Irish moss, and pearl moss, has been long eaten in Europe. It is recommended as a medicine, but it has no bitter principle, and probably is less tonic than the lichen. Seaweeds have occasionally been resorted to by the poorer inhabitants of the seashores of Europe, more especially in Ireland, when the ordinary corn or potato crop has failed. They, however, contain but little nutriment, and anyone living on nothing else would soon starve. Laver-weed is a peculiar kind of seaweed. Gosse, in his handbook to South Wales, describes it as one of the edible curiosities of the Gower Coast. Women attend the Swansea market, and sell it in small round pats at 1d. and 2d. each. The weed makes an excellent ingredient in sauce for mutton. It is obtained close to low-water mark. To prepare it, wash it well in sea-water to free it from sand, then boil it for twelve hours, and season with salt. In winter it is only necessary to boil it for two hours. The weed grows rapidly, except in winter, and is renewed every other springtide. It is also used in some parts of Scotland on the coast, where it is called sloke or slokum.
The passage is mostly a survey, but the last few lines are a working method for laverbread, and they hold up. What needs adjusting is the boiling time and the washing.
- What laver isLaver is Porphyra (in Britain usually Porphyra umbilicalis), closely related to the seaweeds used for Japanese nori, though those are now generally placed in a separate genus. It is a thin, purple-black, almost translucent sheet weed found on rock near the low-water mark, quite unlike the crisp, branching carrageen the entry opens with. Chrondrus crispus here is a misprint for Chondrus crispus.
- The hinge: wash out every grain of sandLaver clings to rock and traps grit in its folds, and grit does not cook out. Change the water four or five times and work the fronds between your fingers each time; sea water is not necessary and fresh water is easier to judge. One missed pocket of sand ruins the whole pot.
- Twelve hours is far too longTwelve hours is longer than needed -- Laverbread is generally simmered for some hours until the weed collapses into a dark green-black pur he loolook excessive against modern practice, which tends to be shorter; a pressure cooker will cut the time substantially. Cook until it has broken down rather than to the clock.
- The winter note is about the weed, not the fireThe winter note -- The entry pairs the shorter two-hour winter boil with its observation that the weed grows rapidly except in winter; the reason is not given and can only be guessed at. Judge by texture rather than the clock in either season.
- Sauce for muttonThe traditional finish is to beat the cooked purée with butter and the juice of a Seville orange or a lemon, loosen it with a little of the meat's own gravy, and serve hot with mutton or lamb. It wants salt and acid; without the acid it tastes flat and faintly metallic.
- The pats at 1d. and 2d.The entry does not say how much weed a pat held, nor whether the Swansea market women sold it raw or already boiled; both prices simply mark two sizes of small round pat. Tinned or tubbed laverbread is still sold in South Wales and saves the whole operation.
- If you gather it yourselfCut fronds from clean, exposed rock on an ebbing spring tide, away from harbours, outfalls and estuary mouths; seaweed concentrates whatever is in the water around it. Check local shellfish and bathing-water notices for the stretch of coast before harvesting.
- YieldFresh laver cooks down to a very small quantity of pur he far less than the raw bulk suggests. Judge quantities by eye, allowing generously for the reduction, whether saucing mutton or frying it in bacon fat as cakes.
Laver has been eaten along the Bristol Channel, the Gower and the west coast of Scotland for centuries, and the two names given here mark two traditions: bara lawr or laverbread in Wales, slake or sloke in Scotland and northern Ireland. The Gosse cited is probably Philip Henry Gosse, the naturalist whose popular seaside handbooks of the 1850s did much to make British shore life a respectable middle-class interest, and Cassell's is quoting him as an authority on a curiosity rather than a staple. The framing of the whole entry is telling: written within living memory of the Irish famine, it treats seaweed first as famine food and takes pains to warn that it will not keep a person alive, before conceding that one kind of it makes an excellent sauce for mutton. Laverbread has kept that double character ever since: dark pats beside the cockles, and elsewhere in Britain an oddity, until nori made the idea of eating a purple sheet weed unremarkable.