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Iceland Moss Jelly
Soak one-fourth ounce of isinglass in one-half pint of cold water for three hours and then boil gently. Steep three-fourths ounce of Iceland moss in one quart of cold water, then boil and simmer down to one-half pint. Add the isinglass previously boiled, sweeten to taste, with the sugar and flavor with lemon juice.
This is invalid cookery rather than dessert in the modern sense: a clear, faintly bitter jelly built on two ingredients almost nobody keeps now. It works, but it needs sourcing and a little patience.
- Iceland moss is a lichenCetraria islandica, not a moss and not a culinary herb. It is still sold dried through herbalists and Scandinavian and German suppliers; three-fourths ounce is about 21 g, a surprisingly large bundle of dry curls.
- Debitter it firstIceland moss carries bitter lichen acids that leach into water. The traditional treatment is a preliminary soak of an hour or two in cold water, drained and discarded, before the steeping the recipe calls for. Skip it and the jelly is medicinally bitter rather than pleasantly so.
- IsinglassDried sturgeon or cod swim bladder, sold as leaf or shreds and still used for fining beer and wine. One-fourth ounce is about 7 g. It is a pure collagen gelatin and behaves like sheet gelatin, though it dissolves slowly and wants the full three-hour cold soak.
- If you substitute gelatinA 7 g envelope of powdered gelatin sets roughly two cups of liquid to a soft jelly, which is close to what this quantity produces. Bloom it in the half pint of cold water rather than boiling it.
- MeasuresA half pint is one cup, a quart four cups. The moss liquor reduces from four cups to one, which takes a good while at a bare simmer; strain it through muslin, as the lichen throws a good deal of debris.
- The hingeCombine the two liquids while both are still warm, and strain. Isinglass stirred into a cooled, half-set moss decoction is unlikely to disperse evenly.
- Sweetening and flavor"Sweeten to taste" is left open; two to three tablespoons of sugar for the finished pint, plus the juice of half a lemon, is one reasonable reading. The acid also brightens the flat note of the moss.
- Yield and settingAbout one pint, or four small sickroom portions. Chill at least four hours.
Iceland moss earned its place in nineteenth-century cookbooks through the pharmacy, not the kitchen. The lichen was a staple famine food in Iceland and northern Scandinavia, ground into flour or boiled into porridge, and by the eighteenth century European physicians had adopted it as a demulcent for coughs, consumption and "weak stomachs" — its mucilage coats the throat, and it is still sold as a cough remedy in parts of Europe. Recipes like this one, thickened further with isinglass, belong to the long tradition of invalid jellies: light, clear, nourishing-looking preparations fed to the bedridden when solid food was thought too taxing. Calf's-foot jelly, wine jelly and moss jelly all sat in the same conceptual space, and the same household might make them for a convalescent one week and a supper table the next. Isinglass was a common household setting agent before commercial powdered gelatin became cheap and reliable around the turn of the century, after which both ingredients dropped out of general cookery.