Joe McNamee: Failing to maximise the potential of seaweed

I’ve eaten many a traditional Irish dish, but deliciously perfect and perfectly delicious Carrageen moss pudding … nothing, nada, zilch. Is it because the crucial component is ‘seaweed’?

JR Ryall and Myrtle Allen harvesting fresh Carrageen moss

Whenever lucky enough to dine in Ballymaloe House, I always raid pastry chef JR Ryall’s legendary dessert trolley. Dishes may be dictated by season’s surplus or scarcity, but there is always Carrageen moss pudding. I never refuse it. It may be understated in comparison to JR’s other glorious creations but its elemental simplicity remains its essence, a sublime comfort with whipped cream and soft muscovado sugar. Leaving aside renowned Ballymaloe Relish, Carrageen moss pudding is probably Myrtle Allen’s most beloved recipe from her seminal Ballymaloe Cookbook. A traditional peasant dish, it became the iconic trope of her singular approach to fine dining, Irish-style.

Nowadays, the very best Irish restaurants deliver Irish produce-driven menus, a gradual coherence of a distinctly native contemporary cuisine. Most credit Myrtle as the original of the species, her Ballymaloe Cookbook a near biblical text. Yet, though it may be the most quintessentially Irish recipe in the book, I can’t recall ever seeing it on any other Irish restaurant menu. Chefs copy other chefs all the time, sometimes disguising the ‘theft’ with variations on a theme, other times brazenly replicating the original. Yet the Carrageen moss pudding appears to be out of bounds.