Photo: Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen, Public domain (via Wikimedia Commons)
Irish Moss
Chondrus crispus
Also known as Carrageen Moss, Carragheen, Pearl Moss, Sea Pearl Moss
Key benefits
✦Traditional uses
✦Along the rocky coasts of Ireland and Brittany, this humble seaweed became a household remedy for chest colds, sore throats, and hungry stomachs, especially during the hardship of the potato famine years when it helped stretch scarce food into something nourishing. Cooks and healers alike prized it for the same trait, a mucilaginous, gel-forming quality that soothed irritated tissue when simmered into a drink and thickened milk into pudding when simmered into a dessert. Coastal families dried it on stone walls and rooftops each summer, keeping a store on hand for winter coughs long before anyone had heard the word carrageenan. It traveled from folk kitchen to pharmacy shelf, eventually becoming the source of the thickening agent still used in foods today.
How to grow & use it
✦The full apothecary for Irish Moss
Traditional remedies and step-by-step preparations, a complete growing guide, and how to harvest, dry, and store it, all unlocked with HerbLens Unlimited.
- ✦Remedies & preparations
- ✦ Growing guide
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- ✦Ginger
- ✦Licorice root
- ✦Slippery elm
- ✦Agar agar
- ✦Slippery elm bark
Irish moss is the original source of carrageenan, the thickener that still gives commercial ice cream, chocolate milk, and puddings their smooth, creamy body, a quiet legacy of a famine-era kitchen remedy now found in supermarket aisles worldwide.
Irish moss is naturally high in iodine, so people with thyroid conditions should use it cautiously. Like other seaweeds it can absorb heavy metals and pollutants from its coastal waters, so only gather it from clean shores or buy from a reputable source, and it may have mild blood-thinning effects worth noting for anyone on anticoagulant medication.