Skip to main content
Dessert

Carrageen Jellt or Irish Moss

A gelatinous dessert made from Irish moss, water, lemon juice, and saccharin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Irish moss and lemon work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 61 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Carrageen Jellt or Irish Moss

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the Irish moss well and soak it in cold water for several hours.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the soaked Irish moss and 1 quart of cold water.

Simmer and set

  1. Simmer slowly for 4 to 5 hours.

  2. Strain the mixture, then add lemon juice and sweeten with saccharin to taste.

  3. Pour into a wetted mold and set aside until cold.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Irish moss + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together61 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Irish moss
Its carrageenan dissolves in the hot water and forms a gel as it cools.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the mild, gelled flavor.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly for 4 to 5 hours. A gentle simmer draws the gelling carrageenan out of the moss. A hard, rolling boil can break down the gelling compounds, leaving a weaker set.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Irish Moss Blanc MangerIrish Moss Blanc Manger27 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes