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Britain and Ireland · Volume 36, The Grass, the Grain and the Border That Doesn’t Cut the Table

Yellowman and Dulse

Ballycastle, County Antrim

Yellowman honeycomb toffee and dulse: rough broken shards of pale golden honeycomb toffee with a porous, bubbled interior, piled beside a small tangle of dark reddish brown dried dulse seaweed strands.

Illustration

Time
20 minutes
Researched
1 source cited

The Auld Lammas Fair has run on the last Monday and Tuesday of August in Ballycastle since Sir Randal MacDonnell, 1st Earl of Antrim, secured a royal charter from King James I in 1606. Yellowman, a brittle, golden honeycomb toffee traditionally broken from large blocks and sold in paper cones, is historically paired there with dulse, dried seaweed eaten as a snack in its own right, a pairing credited by several accounts to a local shopkeeper and bog-oak carver, John Henry McAuley, though only in secondary retellings rather than a primary heritage document.

As tradition built it

Makes about 500g. About 20 minutes.

Ingredients

  • 200 g golden syrup
  • 200 g granulated sugar
  • 50 g butter
  • 2 tbsp malt vinegar
  • 2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
  • to serve dried dulse

Method

  1. Combine the syrup, sugar, butter and vinegar in a heavy pan, and heat gently until the sugar dissolves.
  2. Bring to a boil and cook, without stirring, to hard-crack stage, about 150°C on a sugar thermometer.
  3. Remove from the heat, and beat in the bicarbonate of soda quickly, it will foam up dramatically.
  4. Pour immediately onto a lined tray, and leave to cool and set completely.
  5. Break into rough pieces, and serve alongside torn dried dulse, exactly as sold from the fair's paper cones.

What a modern chef changes

The seaweed worked into the toffee itself, rather than simply served beside it.

Rung 5

Method

  1. Grind dried dulse to a fine powder in a dedicated spice grinder, and fold a spoonful directly into the toffee just before the bicarbonate goes in, distributing its savoury, mineral note through the whole batch rather than leaving it as a separate pairing.
  2. Reserve a portion of the batch unseasoned, so a taster can compare the plain version against the dulse-folded one directly, honestly showing what the addition actually changes.
  3. Break the set toffee with a light dusting of extra dulse powder over the broken faces, echoing the same technique this chapter's oyster entry uses.
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