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IVORY DUST JELLY (Invalid Cookery)
Put a pound of ivory powder into three quarts of cold water. Place it on a gentle fire, or in the oven, and let it simmer slowly for four or five hours, until the liquid is reduced more than half. Put it aside, and when quite cold and stiff, lift off the jellied part, being careful to leave the sediment untouched, and proceed as recommended for calf's foot jelly (see CALF'S FOOT JELLY). Ivory jelly is excellent for consumptive patients. Time, four or five hours to simmer the ivory dust. Probable cost, 10d. per pound. The above ingredients are sufficient for a pint and a half of jelly.
This belongs to the vanished branch of Victorian "invalid cookery," and it cannot be reproduced today. The points below explain what the ingredient was and why the recipe is now a dead letter.
- The ingredient is elephant ivoryThe ingredient is ivory turnings — "Ivory dust" or "ivory turnings" were the shavings and sawdust swept up in the workshops of comb, cutlery-handle and billiard-ball makers, sold by weight to chemists and grocers. It would usually have been elephant tusk, though other ivories were worked in the same shops, and at a pound per batch this is not a trace quantity.
- International trade is prohibitedElephant ivory is controlled under CITES and banned or tightly restricted for sale in the UK, the US, the EU and most other jurisdictions. There is no legitimate route to buying a pound of ivory dust for the kitchen, and possession with intent to sell can be a criminal matter.
- Hippopotamus and walrus "ivory" are no betterThe historical substitutes named in old trade manuals come from species that are themselves now protected. Substituting one for the other solves nothing.
- What it was actually doingIvory is dentine, and dentine is roughly a fifth collagen by weight. Long slow simmering hydrolyses that collagen into gelatin, which is why the cooled liquid sets and why the recipe then sends you to calf's foot jelly for flavouring and clearing. The gelling agent is chemically the same substance sold in leaves and sachets today; nothing about the ivory contributed nourishment that gelatin does not.
- The medical claim is wrongConsumption was pulmonary tuberculosis, a bacterial infection. Gelatin is an incomplete protein, lacking tryptophan, and a jelly of it has essentially no therapeutic value for a wasting patient.
- The sedimentThe instruction to lift the set jelly off and leave the residue untouched is telling: what remains at the bottom is the undissolved mineral fraction of the tusk, mostly calcium phosphate.
- If you want the dishA modern gelatin or calf's foot jelly recipe gives the same result by design. Use one of those.
Cassell's places this in the invalid cookery chapters that many large Victorian household manuals carried, alongside beef tea, arrowroot gruel and barley water — the repertoire of dishes cooked for the sickroom in an age when nursing and feeding the ill fell largely to the household. Ivory dust reached the kitchen because Britain's nineteenth-century ivory trade was enormous: tusks came through Zanzibar and London in tons to supply Sheffield cutlery works and the comb and piano-key trades, and the waste dust was cheap enough at tenpence a pound to sell on to chemists. The belief that jellies were peculiarly strengthening for consumptives was standard medical opinion of the period rather than a cook's invention. Entries like this one are a reminder of how far the Victorian larder extended into the raw materials of empire, and how quickly a household staple can become something no kitchen may lawfully hold.