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IVORY JELLY (Invalid Cookery)
Infuse six ounces of ivory powder in three pints of cold water, and simmer them until the liquid is reduced to half the quantity. Let it get cold to jelly, and remove the sediment. When wanted, warm it up, add a little cinnamon or a few cloves, the juice and some of the rind of a lemon, and sugar enough to sweeten. Let the jelly dissolve slowly without reducing it further. Strain for use.
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This belongs to the sickroom chapter of Victorian cookery, and it cannot be made now. The single ingredient that gives the jelly its body is elephant or hippopotamus ivory.
- The protected species problem"Ivory powder" or ivory dust was the waste from turners' and cutlers' workshops, cut from elephant and hippopotamus tusks. Both are listed under CITES, and the trade in raw ivory is prohibited or tightly restricted in nearly every country. There is no lawful culinary source.
- What the ivory was doingIvory is dentine: a mineral matrix bound with collagen. Long simmering hydrolyses that collagen into gelatin, which is what sets the liquid. The mineral fraction settles out as the "sediment" the recipe tells you to remove.
- Not a nourishing foodNineteenth-century invalid cookery treated gelatin as a concentrated nutriment. It is an incomplete protein, low in tryptophan, and a jelly of this kind supplied warmth, sugar and fluid rather than any real sustenance to a sick person.
- Substitute ivory-turnings sold in the periodMaterial sold as 'ivory' dust may not always have been ivory; bone dust or other unspecified animal shavings are a plausible substitution, with no control over origin or handling, though how common this was is not documented.
- If you want the finished dishA spiced, lemon-scented sweet jelly is a straightforward thing to make from a current recipe using commercial gelatin or a plant setting agent. Use one of those rather than adapting this text.
- Reading the methodWorth noting for interest only: three pints reduced by half is a pint and a half, which implies a long slow simmer, and the instruction to dissolve the set jelly slowly 'without reducing it further' appears to guard against concentrating it beyond a pleasant texture.
Invalid cookery formed its own department in Victorian household books, and its staple was jelly: calf's-foot jelly, hartshorn jelly from deer antler, isinglass from sturgeon air bladders, and ivory jelly from the dust and turnings of the ivory workshops. All four exploited the same chemistry without naming it, and a clear animal jelly was widely recommended in the period as digestible and restorative for a patient who could keep little else down. Ivory dust was a by-product of an industry: Britain imported tusks in volume through the nineteenth century for piano keys, billiard balls, cutlery handles and combs, and the cutting left quantities of powder and turnings. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery is a late-Victorian compilation, reissued over several decades, and the recipe survived in print well past the point where anyone was making it.