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Also called sea-moss pudding, this Maritime dessert is similar to a blancmange, but an edible seaweed is the jelling agent instead of gelatine, and whipped egg whites replace the more usual cornstarch. One old recipe was thought especially helpful for invalids or anyone with "a delicate digestion" and this was Irish moss jelly, in which a small handful of cleaned, dried Irish moss was boiled in two cups of water, then cooled. A cup of milk was then stirred in and a little sugar added. Highly restorative, according to many a Prince Edward Island grandmother!

Irish moss, Canada's most valuable commercial seaweed, is one of the red algae, usually Chondrus crispus, but several other seaweeds are sometimes called Irish moss. It is called carrageen in Scotland and Ireland, and was named after a town near Waterford in Ireland, Carragheen. But the town may have owed its moniker to an Irish term for the moss, cosáinín carraige, literally in Erse 'little foot of the rock.'

Chondrus crispus is related to another popular edible seaweed called dulse, examined in the chapter on New Brunswick food words.

Irish moss is exported from Prince Edward Island and processed to yield a hydrocolloid, carrageenin. All of us use products every day that contain carrageenin as an emulsifying and stabilizing agent. For example, it holds together the ingredients in many toothpastes, shampoos, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and prepared foods like chocolate milk, ice cream, and commercial salad dressings. Check the list of ingredients on any commercial food product that might qualify as 'goopy.'

Carrageenin is also used to clarify liquids like beer, wine, coffee, and honey. In many frozen foods, carrageenin helps retard the formation of ice crystals in products that can be kept cold for long periods.

 

      

 

Irish Moss Industry on P.E.I.

Gathered as well along the coasts of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Irish moss has been an important commercial crop on Prince Edward Island for so long that some unique Island terms have grown up around its collection, notably the noun mosser, referring to one who harvests the seaweed.

A mosser is also a high, stormy wind that wafts Irish moss toward the shore. Such winds help produce the underwater waves of turbulence that rip Irish moss fronds from their holdfasts on seabed rocks in the lower tidal and subtidal zones.

Water-plumped and tempest-rolled, rows of green strands festoon shores in the north of Prince Edward Island near Tignish, Miminegash, Cape Tryon, North Rustico, and Covehead.

Moss that reaches a beach is forked into piles by combers using hand rakes. Horse mossers collect Irish moss near shore by rakes and wire-mesh scoops pulled through the water by a moss horse. Such horses are usually large and fearless, for they sometimes have to haul moss in water right up to their necks and work among several dozen other horses when twenty or thirty horse mossers all harvest one stretch of shore after an especially bountiful storm.

A former term for profit from such a sea-gift was moss money. In olden days, children often had the job of cleaning freshly harvested moss of pebbles, shells, sea wrack, and other unwanted seaweeds. On Prince Edward Island one such impurity is called monkey fur, being the seaweed genus Halopteris, whose thick brown strands are matted through the Irish moss and make it hard to dry.

Another tangly intruder has the P.E.I. nickname, shoe-string. It's a green, eelgrass-like seaweed of the Chondra genus and must be plucked from a mosser's haul if the harvester wants top price from processors.

Popular Canadian balladeer Stompin' Tom Connors who wrote the rollicking "Bud The Spud" about P.E.I.'s potato industry also celebrated seaweed in his "Song of The Irish Moss" where he wrote "You can hear them roar from the Tignish Shore / There's moss on Skinner's Pond."