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Irish Moss Blanc Mange
4 cups milk 2 tablespoons sugar ½ teaspoon salt 1/4 cup Irish moss 1 teaspoon vanilla Soak the moss; tie in cheese cloth, and cook in milk in double boiler thirty minutes without stirring. Remove moss without pressing bag; add other ingredients, strain into wet molds, chill, and serve.
A carrageen-set milk pudding that depends entirely on the moss releasing its gel into hot milk without agitation. Nothing here is difficult, but the details of the seaweed and the mold matter.
- The hinge: do not stir, do not squeezeStirring breaks up the softening moss and pushes fine debris and mucilage through the cheesecloth, giving a slimy, speckled pudding. Lift the bag out and let it drain on its own; wringing it releases the ropiest fraction and a stronger seaweed flavor.
- Irish mossDried carrageen seaweed (Chondrus crispus), still sold whole in health-food shops and Irish grocers. A quarter cup of the dry, curled fronds is only about a quarter to a third of an ounce (roughly 7-10 g), depending on how loosely it sits — measure loosely rather than packing it. Powdered carrageenan is not a substitute at this ratio.
- Soaking and picking overCover with cold water for 10–15 minutes, then rinse and pick out grit, small shells and bits of other weed, which are common in whole-leaf moss. The book assumes the cook knows this; it is the difference between a clean pudding and a gritty one.
- Double boilerGenuinely necessary. Milk held over direct heat for thirty minutes will scorch on the bottom, and you cannot stir it loose here. Keep the water below a hard boil.
- Set strengthCarrageen varies batch to batch, so the firmness of the set is not predictable from the timing alone; thirty minutes may give only a soft, spoonable pudding. If you want it to stand up on a plate, expect to go longer or use a little more moss, and test a spoonful chilled on a saucer.
- Wet moldsRinsing the molds with cold water and not drying them leaves a film that lets the pudding drop out cleanly. Individual cups, a 1-quart mold, or a loaf pan all work.
- MilkWhole milk. Carrageen sets skim milk too, but the result is thin and faintly marine-tasting; the fat is doing real work on the flavor.
- Vanilla and yieldAdd the vanilla off the heat with the sugar and salt so it does not cook off. Four cups of milk yields six to eight small servings; serve with cream, stewed fruit, or a chocolate sauce, as Lowney's catalog would have expected.
Carrageen moss puddings came into American cookbooks by way of Ireland and the New England coast, where the same seaweed grows thickly on rocky shores and was harvested, bleached in the sun and dried for sale through the nineteenth century. Its setting power made it the standard invalid food of the era — nurses' manuals and hospital diet lists recommended carrageen blancmange for the sick and convalescent long before anyone had isolated carrageenan as a chemical, and the extract went on to become one of the most widely used stabilizers in the industrial dairy case. "Blanc mange" is simply French for "white food," a name that once covered any pale set cream, from medieval almond-milk dishes onward. Its appearance in a Lowney's book — a chocolate company's cookbook, published to sell cocoa — reflects the habit of pairing a plain white pudding with a chocolate sauce, so that even the unflavored desserts led back to the product.