@augustlan, dulse isn’t just a seaweed. It’s a delicacy. The species rhodophyta has many excellent characteristics, and the kind popularly known as dulse is harvested, dried, and packaged as a snack food.
It’s one of those things (like certain ethnic foods) that people either love or hate, and I love it. It’s salty and rubbery, and you have to watch out for tiny shells, pebbles, deceased crustaceans, and bits of inedible seaweed caught in the layers, and if you eat too much of it at once—as I am always in danger of doing—it affects your intestines in such a way that, um, you don’t want to stray too far from indoor plumbing.
My father was born on Grand Manan, an island off the New Brunswick coast in the Bay of Fundy, and when he was a boy he used to harvest the stuff and dry it on the rocks for the wholesalers for 25 cents a bushel. My Canadian uncles fed me dulse out of paper sacks when I was a little girl. I have bought it in bulk from huge stalls in Saint John. If it makes it across the border, it is usually in overpriced little cellophane bags and not very fresh.
It doesn’t have much of a U.S. clientele that I know of beyond the border regions, though I have caught up with it in a few natural-foods places for outrageous prices. My son used to get me some at the Rainbow Grocery in SF. But mostly I just have a dormant unsatisfied craving that awakens at the first mention of Canadian produce.
We have Vermont for maple syrup, Maine for lobsters, and all the northern U.S. states for snow and ice, and I’m not into sports. Where else can I get dulse?
