Ever heard of carrageenan pudding? No? Neither had food content creator Annie Mae Herring until a few weeks ago.
“It was awful,” says the 33-year-old from Essex. “It was a soggy welly, with, like, Fairy Liquid and a bit of salt.”
A milk-based dessert similar in appearance to a blancmange, the pudding uses carrageen moss – a type of seaweed found in coastal areas – to give it a gelatinous texture.
“Maybe I did it wrong, and I will absolutely throw my hands up in the air,” Herring admits, before adding jokingly that, either way, it “may die a fiery death”.
This pudding is one of many dishes Herring has been making and posting to her followers, as part of a social media series exploring endangered and lost recipes from the UK and Ireland.
Other dishes include a Staffordshire clanger – a half-sweet, half-savoury pasty she describes as “wonderfully strange”; Brown Windsor soup, which is associated with the Victorian royals; and chocolate concrete, a school-dinner classic Herring paired with a radioactive green custard, reminiscent of her own school days.