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Chocolate (Cup sugar cup boiling water)
1/4 cup sugar 1/4 cup boiling water Soak Irish moss in cold water twenty minutes; drain, and pick over. Put milk in double boiler; add moss, and cook without stirring thirty minutes. Melt chocolate; add sugar and water; boil two minutes; add to first mixture. Strain, mold, chill, and serve with sugar and cream.
This is a carrageen blancmange — an Irish moss chocolate mold — and the text as printed here has lost most of its ingredient list. What survives is the method, which is sound; the quantities have to be reasoned out.
- The missing amountsOnly the sugar and water made it onto the page. Comparable Irish moss blancmanges of the period use roughly 1/3 cup of picked dry moss to a quart of milk, with 1 to 2 ounces of chocolate. Treat any figure you supply as your own, not the book's.
- Irish mossCarrageen, the dried seaweed Chondrus crispus, sold in health-food and Caribbean groceries. Soaking and picking over is not optional housekeeping: dried moss carries sand, shell fragments and stray bits of other weed, and picking over is the best chance to get them out before the final straining.
- Why you must not stirThe gelling substance leaches out of the moss into the hot milk over the full thirty minutes, and the instruction to leave it alone was presumably meant to keep the fronds intact so that fragments do not work through the strainer. Leave it in the double boiler undisturbed.
- The chocolateThe recipe says only 'chocolate,' which in a book of this period means unsweetened baking chocolate. Use unsweetened, not semisweet, or the 1/4 cup of sugar will push the whole thing to candy sweetness.
- Boiling the syrupMelted chocolate plus sugar and boiling water, boiled two minutes, makes a smooth syrup rather than a gritty paste. Keep to the two minutes the recipe gives; longer only concentrates the syrup further.
- Straining and moldingStrain while hot through a fine sieve or a doubled square of cheesecloth; once it cools it will not pass. Rinse the mold in cold water before filling so the set custard releases.
- ChillingCarrageen sets more slowly and more softly than gelatin. Give it at least four hours, better overnight, and expect a tender, quivering set rather than a firm one.
- YieldOn the quart of milk assumed above, expect something on the order of six servings, with sugar and cream passed separately as the recipe directs.
Irish moss blancmange belongs to a nineteenth-century tradition of invalid cookery: carrageen was regarded as strengthening and easy to digest, and boiled in milk it gave a jelly that was often said to serve where isinglass was not at hand. The moss was gathered commercially along the coasts of Ireland and later of Massachusetts, and Boston cookbooks — Lowney's among them — treated it as an everyday store-cupboard item. Its appearance in a chocolate manufacturer's book is straightforwardly promotional: the company issued recipe collections to find new uses for its cocoa and baking chocolate, and a chocolate carrageen mold turned a plain sickroom pudding into a dessert.