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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.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time
20 minutes
Researched
1 source cited
Reviewed
Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked
Not yet cooked and reported

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, and this chapter names that limit rather than repeating the attribution as settled fact.

As tradition built it

Makes about 500g. About 20 minutes.

Ingredients

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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