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Dessert

Carrageen Jelly or Irish Moss

Carrageen jelly is a sweetened gelatin made from Irish moss, lemon juice, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 Jelly or Irish Moss

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the Irish moss well.

  2. Soak the Irish moss in cold water for several hours.

Make the jelly

  1. Combine the soaked Irish moss with 4 cups of cold water in a saucepan.

  2. Simmer slowly for 4 to 5 hours.

  3. Strain the mixture.

  4. Add the lemon juice and sweeten to taste.

  5. Pour the mixture into a wetted mold.

  6. 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
Carrageenan in the moss gels as it cools, setting the liquid into a firm jelly.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the mild jelly.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly for 4 to 5 hours. Carrageenan must be fully extracted from the moss into the water to set properly. Too little simmering leaves the jelly weak, while a hard boil can break down the gel-forming strands and reduce its firmness.

“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.

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