Word Finder - isinglass

definition

A form of gelatine obtained from the air bladder of the sturgeon and certain other fish, used as an adhesive and as a clarifying agent for wine and beer.

definition

A thin, transparent sheet of mica (probably from its similarity to true isinglass).

Jewellers' or Armenian cement consists of isinglass with mastic and gum ammoniac dissolved in spirit.

The Polynemidae, which range from the Atlantic through the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, supply animals from which isinglass is prepared; one of them, the mango-fish, esteemed a great delicacy, inhabits the seas from the Bay of Bengal to Siam.

He turned his shop into a furniture factory; soon sold this and for a short time was engaged in the grocery business on the site of the present Bible House, opposite Cooper Union; and then invested in a glue and isinglass factory, situated for twenty-one years in Manhattan (where the Park Avenue Hotel was built later) and then in Brooklyn.

The fish of greatest economic value are sturgeon (four species), which yield great quantities of caviare and isinglass, the herring, the salmon and the lobster.

Few seas are more prolific in fish than the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman; the great proportion of known species are edible and many have a commercial value for the isinglass or oil Shelly conglomerates and dead coral reefs of the littoral; red sandhills of the coast of Trucial Oman; alluvium of Turkish Iraq; river and lake deposits of Oman and the interior of Persia.

For this purpose isinglass, gelatin or, in the case of high-class red wines, white of egg is employed.

Within the brewing industry, isinglass finings are added to the cask in liquid form to assist sedimentation of yeast and proteins.

An alternative to using isinglass would be mechanical fining, that is leaving the cask to stand for six weeks.

They estimate that they supply 100 per cent of the market for dry isinglass and 90 per cent of the market for hydrolysed isinglass.

In any case, the parties have an effective monopoly on UK supplies of dry isinglass.

Horizontal issues The number of suppliers of liquid isinglass in the UK has already reduced in the past few years from four to two.

The less robust species, such as Sphacelaria scoparia, which do not adhere well to paper, may be made to do so by brushing them over either with milk carefully skimmed, or with a liquid formed by placing isinglass (4 oz.) and water (11 oz.) in a wide-mouthed bottle, and the bottle in a small glue-pot or saucepan containing cold water, heating until solution is effected, and then adding i oz.

The air-bladder of this fish furnishes isinglass, little, if at all, inferior to that obtained from the sturgeon, while from the liver is obtained cod-liver oil, largely used in medicine as a remedy in scrofulous complaints and pulmonary consumption (see CODLIVER OIL).