Skip to main content
Dessert

Water Jelly or Milk Jelly Made with Iceland Moss

A jelly made from Iceland moss, water or milk, sweetened with loaf sugar.

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

Why it works: Milk and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Water Jelly or Milk Jelly Made with Iceland Moss

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the moss

  1. Wash the Iceland Moss well in cold water.

  2. Soak the moss in a basin of cold water overnight.

  3. Squeeze the moss dry in a cloth.

Make the jelly

  1. Place the moss in a saucepan with 1 quart of cold water.

  2. Bring the saucepan to a boil and let it simmer for 1 hour, stirring frequently.

  3. Strain the mixture through a sieve into a basin and sweeten with loaf sugar.

  4. Serve with either wine or milk according to taste.

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. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Iceland moss
Provides the gelling agent that thickens the water into a jelly as it simmers.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness to the strained jelly.

The step that matters

Simmering the moss for 1 hour. Simmering extracts the gelling compounds from the moss. Stirring frequently keeps the moss from sticking and scorching on the base of the pan, which would give the jelly a burnt taste.

“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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes