Cheng He | University of Warwick
Imagine that you are one of the guests at a luxurious wedding banquet in late-sixteenth-century England. The feast appeals to guests’ five senses, rather than just colours and tastes of food: the air is scented with the fragrance of roses, and the musical performance adds calmness and pleasure in the background. The scent, taste, colours of food, flowers, a touch of tableware, music, guests talking, and the light of candles together weave a synaesthetic experience. After several courses of exquisitely prepared dishes and wine, the banquet is approaching the end. You and other guests are invited to another room for the final service: ‘banquetting stuffe’. Unlike previous courses, the food is in various shapes: miniatures of a building and a garden, among which there are figures, flowers, tableware, keys, gloves, and shoes. Some of them are filled with almond comfits, walnuts, and fruits. You are unsure if all of these are food and reach for a small plate from the table to gather some sweet food—then you realise that the plate, which looks like a white ceramic, is much lighter and more brittle than expected. You hold it so tightly that you accidentally break the rim—the plate itself is food, too.
Above miniatures, flowers, fruits, nuts, and tableware were all sugary imitations of real food and objects. Visual records of banquets like this can be found in Continental Europe. The main ingredients of these sugar sculptures include sugar, gum tragacanth, and egg whites. One can make a pliable sugar-paste dough by stirring the ingredients in hot water. The sugar paste can be made into any shape with added pigments for imitation. Apart from objects and food, animals were also made from the paste. Together with comfits, marzipan, biscuits, and gingerbread, the “banquetting stuffe” formed an interactive display, inviting guests to feel the imitation through observation, touching, and tasting. As sugar was also a valuable imported material in Renaissance England, making sugary works became a way to amaze the guests and demonstrate wealth, a custom heavily influenced by the Italian banquet in the sixteenth century.
Sugar sculptures show that the intersection of senses was not merely the interactions between people, the dining room, and food. One can go through a multisensory experience via sugar sculptures alone: they were eye-deceiving, with diverse colours and shapes to imitate other objects of different materials; they were meant to be eaten in the end, providing a tactile and gustatory experience. The most direct sensory feature was the visual appearance of the works. Various pigments, some of which were also used in art and craft, were added to sugar paste to imitate different materials. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century recipe books provide instructions for colouring sugary works: roset, a rose pink pigment usually made from brazilwood, can be added for reddish colours; sap-green, which is made from berries of the buckthorn, can be used as green pigment; saffron, a common ingredient for both yellow pigment and medicinal remedies, was recommended as a yellow paint; more intriguing, powder of spices like cinnamon and ginger can be used for brownish colours. Creating sugar sculptures was similar to making art objects when we look at the materials used.
More importantly, sugar sculptures’ imitation was not limited to shapes and colours but also taste. In one of the most famous guidebooks for cooking in this period, Delightes for ladies to adorne their persons, tables, closets (1602), the author Hugh Plat listed a recipe to make sugar sculptures that have the colour and taste of any flower. Plat took violet as an example: beat violets in a mortar with hard sugar, then add rosewater and gum tragacanth, and stir it into a paste, which will have the colour and scent of violet. This method applies to other flowers like marigolds, cowslips, primroses, and bugloss. Sugar flowers' colour, shape, taste, and aroma are reminiscent of real flowers. While invoking one’s memory of the flowers, they also surprised guests with a sweet taste and brittle texture.
Sugar flowers exemplify a less frequently discussed sensory feature during making and eating sugar sculpture: scent. Perfuming food was influenced by French cuisine, and in the case of sugar sculpture, the fragrance could be a crucial part of imitation, such as making a paste of flowers. In general, rosewater, a ubiquitous fragrant water used for perfuming clothes, furniture, and daily objects at home, was also a common ingredient in sugary works. Even if imitation was not considered, the pursuit of pleasant scents using fragrant materials was common in making sugary food. Apart from adding fragrant materials into sugar sculptures, sugar itself underwent diverse processing, including perfuming. Plat in Delightes for ladies mentioned making scented sugar such as musk sugar, cinnamon, or clove sugar. This is simply done by mixing sugar with spices for a few days until the sugar is tinted with the scent. Besides working on sugar, fragrance can be added to sugary works through fragrant oil. This can be found in the making of Manus Christi (hand of Christ), a sugar confectionery made of sugar-drop containing gold leaf. It was often advised to add oil of spices or aromatic substances, such as clove, juniper, sweet almonds, musk, or ambergris. These fragrant materials can be combined with rosewater, serving as cordial. Therefore, sweet scent was a valued quality, and it was in the making of sugar sculpture that fragrance was further used to create deceiving imitations.
While lavish food in Renaissance banquets was heavily influenced by Italian and French cookery, the pursuit of multisensory experience, especially olfactory qualities, is traceable in the medieval period. Unlike today, sugar in the medieval period and sixteenth century was believed to be medicinal, curing cold, heart, and stomach problems. Food and drink made with sugar were more than just desserts; they were remedies. Moreover, the sweet scent of the air or the food and drink was good for one’s health. Before the sixteenth century, sweet scent was already a valued remedy. The scent was not immaterial but existed in the air and penetrated the human skin apart from nostril perception. Aromatic materials from flowers, spices, and animals were made into fragrant powder, oils, water, and distilled liquid. The making of sugar sculpture was thus a combination of art and medicine, emphasising multisensory experience for both artistic and medicinal purposes.
Since taking sugar was a healthcare method, this can partly explain why making sugary food was charged by the lady of the house, who was responsible for taking care of family member’s health conditions. Since the late sixteenth century, more recipe books that contain sugary works were published in England. Besides Plat’s Delightes for ladies, other well-known books include John Partridge’s The treasurie of commodious conceits (1573), Gervase Markham’s The English hous-wife (1616), and John Murrel’s A daily exercise for ladies and gentlewomen (1617). These books were aimed at women at home, with instructions covering cookery, food preservation, remedies for aliments, and distillation.
Among things charged by women at home, making sugar sculpture was one of the closest to art practice as a creative activity. The first hint is an alternative name for sugar sculpture: subtleties. In the sixteenth century, the word often referred to dexterity, ingenuity, and craftiness. The meaning encompasses elements essential for creating art. This, in a way, recognises the delicacy and creativity required for making sculpture. Other clues have been embedded in the materials used in addition to sugar and gum. Pigments mentioned above: roset, sap-green, and saffron, were all commonly used in oil painting and watercolour well into the late seventeenth century when they were more frequently employed in different art forms. The concern for safety led to using pigments from edible materials which were seldom used in art: white roses with alum can serve as straw colour; the bark of elder trees with gum water and alum can replace sap-green, which is poisonous. Another material that overlapped with art practice was gold leaf, a material widely used in illuminated manuscripts, painting, and gilding. In sugary works, gold leaf was sometimes mixed with other ingredients, such as in the making of Manus Christi. In other cases, sugary works were gilded with gold leaf. Marzipan can be gilded with gold leaf cut in different shapes or letters, with papers and rosewater for laying and moistening the gold leaf. This is similar to the gilding of other non-edible art objects, except that the final aim was to consume rather than keep them. Although visual source is scarce, a print of a gilder’s workshop in the later period provides hints for imagination (Fig. 3): craftspeople, including women and men, worked on clocks and utensils; we can imagine a scene in which women gilded sugary works with edible materials in the kitchen back in the Renaissance era.
Gilding is one of the examples of applying art techniques in sugar sculpture. Besides colours, the shapes of sugar sculptures require dexterity and proper design. For shapes that directly copied from original ones, like fruits and animals, moulds can be made from life with plaster or carved wood. The interior of two-part moulds should be cleaned and dried, then boiled rosewater with sugar can be poured into the moulds and left for drying. Two dried sugar casts must be carefully cleaved together, with dissolved gum tragacanth, to join the edges more smoothly. Superfluous edges can be removed with a knife to achieve a smooth joint. The making process shares similarity with that of making sculptures with plaster. Moreover, one can put sugar comfits into the moulds, so guests would be surprised when breaking the sugar sculpture. This interactive art installation can be fully experienced only when damaged.
Although recipes provide tips for making sugar paste stiffer for a firmer structure, creating a sugar sculpture in the shape of a building was more complicated. Moulding and casting were certainly to be used for small parts. Makers also needed to consider the structure and proportion for the stability of sugar buildings. How ladies at home decided on applicable sources of architecture for imitation, how they mastered the knowledge of making intricate sugary works, and what inventive elements were incorporated into the works, just like the creative use of spices as food pigments, are other interesting questions to be answered. However, it is certain that the creativity of women’s “craft” deserves to be acknowledged and explored.
This article briefly shows how sugar sculpture in Renaissance England illustrates the play between food, art, and architecture through multisensory imitations. The five senses, especially the invisible ones like touch and smell, could work together with sight to offer aesthetic pleasure and “healthy” food. As edible works, sugar sculptures and other sweet food were unique art objects. They can serve as an example for surveying the concept of art and craft, and the role of women in art practice in this period.
Further Reading
Nadja Gernalzick and Joseph Imorde (eds), The Mediality of Sugar (Brill, 2023).
Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500-1800, 26 November 2019 - 31 August 2020, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. https://feast-and-fast.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/about/
For more about the exhibition above, see Victoria Avery and Melissa Calaresu (eds), Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500-1800 (Philip Wilson Publishers, 2019).
Peter Brears, Cooking and Dining in Tudor and Early Stuart England (Prospect Books, 2015).
C. Anne Wilson (ed.), “Banquetting stuffe”: The Fare and Social Background of the Tudor and Stuart Banquet (Edinburgh University Press, 1991).
Cheng He completed her PhD in History at the University of Warwick. Her doctoral research focuses on the evolving concept of 'lacquer' in early modern Britain, examining its materiality and varied applications. She has demonstrated that lacquer transcended its common use as a varnish; it was also employed as medicine and other art materials, each with distinct cultural connotations attributed to its unique material characteristics. She is interested in early modern material culture, the history of science, and global art history.
X: @chenghe1737