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Irish Moss Blancmange
1 quart milk 1/3 ounce (a small handful) Irish moss 1/3 cup sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Prepare the moss by soaking and washing it in four changes of cold water, allowing it to soak about fifteen minutes the first time and five or ten minutes the succeeding times, picking it out of each water into the other with the fingers, carefully looking it over, and removing any sand or dark spots. Put the milk into a double boiler to heat. When boiling hot, put the washed moss into the hot milk and cook thirty minutes. The milk will not seem much thickened, but it will be solid when cold. Strain through a fine sieve, stirring the moss to allow all the milk to drain out. Add the remaining ingredients to the milk. Stir well to dissolve the sugar. Pour into a mold wet with cold water or pour into individual molds. When cold, turn out of the molds, and serve with cream or with sliced bananas and cream. Caramel blancmange may be made by adding to the mixture just before pouring it into the molds, sufficient caramel to give it a delicate brown color and a slightly caramel flavor.
A carrageen (Irish moss) set custard, thickened entirely by seaweed rather than gelatin or cornstarch. The set is soft and comes out of the mold cleanly only if the moss is given its full half hour in genuinely hot milk.
- The hinge: real heat, full timeThe milk should be genuinely hot, as the recipe directs, for the whole thirty minutes, and it will still look thin when you strain it. The recipe says as much: the milk "will not seem much thickened, but it will be solid when cold." Cutting the cooking short is a likely reason a carrageen blancmange stays soupy.
- Irish moss, and how muchThis is dried carrageen seaweed (Chondrus crispus), sold in health-food shops and Irish and Caribbean groceries. One-third ounce is about 10 g dry, which really does look like a small handful; measure by weight if you can, since bulk varies with how tightly it is packed.
- Why the washing mattersDried carrageen is harvested off rocks and carries sand, shell fragments and bleached-out or blackened fronds. The four changes of cold water are for grit removal and to soften the fronds, not for flavor, though they also take off some of the marine smell.
- StrainingA fine sieve is the minimum; press and stir the moss against it to recover the thickened milk clinging to it. If your carrageen was coarse, line the sieve with a single layer of cheesecloth.
- Chilling and unmoldingAllow at least four hours in the refrigerator, and overnight is safer. Wetting the mold, as directed, is what lets it release; dipping the outside briefly in warm water helps a stubborn one.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a quart of milk plus the sugar makes slightly over a quart of mixture, enough for one large mold or six individual molds.
- The caramel variation"Caramel" here means sugar cooked dark and dissolved to a syrup, not caramel sauce or candy. The recipe specifies only enough to give a delicate brown color and slight caramel flavor, added just before molding.
- Flavor expectationsCarrageen sets are softer and more delicate than a gelatin mold, with a faint sea note. Serve well chilled, and eat within two days.
Carrageen moss was gathered along the Atlantic coasts of Ireland and, from the mid-nineteenth century, harvested commercially in New England, particularly around Scituate, Massachusetts, where Irish immigrants worked rocks like those they had known at home. Boiled with milk it was a standard invalid food on both sides of the ocean, valued because it gelled without meat-derived gelatin and could be kept dry on a shelf for months. Cookbooks of this period, written when domestic science was arguing for cheap and digestible dishes, treat blancmange thickened with moss as the plain sister of the cornstarch and gelatin versions. The same polysaccharide, extracted and purified as carrageenan, is now in commercial ice cream and dairy drinks doing precisely the job it does here.