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Irish Moss Blanc-Mange
1/3 cup Irish moss 4 cups milk ¼ teaspoon salt 1½ teaspoons vanilla Soak moss fifteen minutes in cold water to cover, drain, pick over, and add to milk; cook in double boiler thirty minutes; the milk will seem but little thicker than when put on to cook, but if cooked longer blanc-mange will be too stiff. Add salt, strain, flavor, re-strain, and fill individual moulds previously dipped in cold water; chill, turn on glass dish, surround with thin slices of banana, and place a slice on each mould. Serve with sugar and cream.
A milk pudding set with carrageen seaweed rather than gelatin, and one of the few Victorian desserts that works unchanged for vegetarians. The whole thing hinges on not overcooking.
- Irish mossThis is carrageen, the dried red seaweed Chondrus crispus, sold in Irish and health food shops and online. It is not the refined carrageenan powder used industrially; a third of a cup of dried whole moss is roughly 10 g, quite loosely packed.
- Picking overDried carrageen arrives with bits of shell, grit and stray weed in it. After the fifteen-minute soak, spread it out and go through it by hand, then rinse again; this step is not optional if you want a clean-tasting pudding.
- Do not cook it longerThe instruction to stop at thirty minutes even though the milk looks barely thickened is the point of the recipe. Carrageen sets on cooling, not in the pan, and extra time in the double boiler gives a rubbery pudding rather than a trembling one.
- The salt quantityThe salt figure has lost its fraction in this printing; a quarter teaspoon is the most likely reading and suits four cups of milk.
- Straining twiceStrain the hot milk once to remove the moss, add the vanilla, then strain again to catch fine fragments. A fine sieve lined with muslin does the job in one pass if you prefer.
- MouldsWetting the moulds is what lets the pudding release. Small ramekins or teacups of about 1/2 cup work; chill at least four hours, and dip the outside briefly in warm water before turning out.
- Milk mattersWhole milk gives the intended set and richness. Skimmed milk sets thinner and tastes flat, and non-dairy milks behave unpredictably with carrageen.
- YieldFour cups of milk fills six to eight individual moulds. There is no sugar in the pudding itself; the recipe leaves the sweetening to the sugar and cream passed at table.
Carrageen moss was gathered along the Atlantic coasts of Ireland and, later, Massachusetts, where it was dried on the shingle at places like Scituate; the New England trade was substantial enough by the late nineteenth century that a Boston cook could buy the weed as an ordinary grocery. Its reputation was medicinal as much as culinary, and carrageen puddings and drinks were standard invalid cookery, recommended for chest complaints and for people who could not keep much else down. Fannie Farmer places this among her cold desserts rather than her sickroom chapter, but the lineage shows in the plainness of the formula: milk, salt, vanilla and nothing else, with the sugar left to the table. The name blanc-mange, French for "white food", once covered a whole family of pale set dishes including medieval versions built on pounded chicken and almonds; by 1896 it meant simply a white milk pudding, thickened with cornstarch, gelatin or, as here, seaweed.