Wednesday 11 September 2013

Banqueting Stuffe To Go


I have just finished making a table full of early modern period sweetmeats for a BBC production which will chart the arrival of Renaissance culture in England. It will all be dispatched in some carefully packed pizza boxes I have scrounged from the local take away. The photo above shows an assemblage of 'banqueting stuffe' typical of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century. On the large charger on the left are 'cinnamon letters according to arte', jumbals, printed bisket, Shropshire cakes, Naples bisket, artificial walnuts, rolled wafers and date leach. At the back two edible sugar tazze are covered with marchpane in collops, muscadines, white gingerbread, sugar plate playing cards and comfits. To the right of the white hart marchpane is a gilded and painted sugar plate trencher copied from one made of beechwood in the British Museum collection. The white gingerbread figures were printed from an original early Stuart mould in my collection and made from a recipe in Lady Anne Clifford's receipt book in the BL. 

White gingerbread figures
There are two edible sugar tazze. One is in Venetian style, the other inspired by the wonderful designs for salts and tazze supported by dolphins by Giulio Romano in the Fitzwilliam Museum. I am truly fortunate in owning a remarkable wooden mould designed to make a tazza of this kind. Next month, I am running a course on sugarwork and confectionery (full up I am afraid) and my students will get a chance to have a go at making one of these themselves.
Sugar tazza in the style of Giulio Romano - moulds below




9 comments:

  1. Any chance you'll add an "Advanced Sugarwork" class to your repertoire?

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    1. Yes. I will. I hope to post my 2014 course diary before the end of September. So look out for it here and on historicfood.com

      Cheers

      Ivan

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    2. Ooh! I've been planning a UK visit for about 3 weeks over Easter and through the first Bank Holiday. Hope it's around that time.

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  2. I've never worked with sugar paste, so I'm curious how the tazza is supported? Is the paste strong enough on its own, or is there a hidden internal structure for support?

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    1. These structures were nearly always made with a supporting armature of some kind - in the case of the two tazze, some wooden dowel is concealed in both. They were not meant to be eaten. Their purpose was to show off the skills of the confectioner.

      Cheers Ivan

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  3. What did you use for the blue and pink coloring agents in the sugar paste items in the top photo?

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    1. Hi Elise,

      The blue was made by crushing the petals of Cornflowers (Centaurea cyanus - sometimes called Blue Bottles by a few 16th and 17th century authors). The pink was made with kermes - the galls that grow on the Kermes Oak (Quercus coccifera) which grows in Greece. I collected a lot of them on the island of Hydra a couple of years ago. Together with red sanders, kermes was the most important (and expensive) old world edible red colouring agent before the popularisation of cochineal. It formerly was a major ingredient in Alkermes, a cordial water which is still made in Turin, though I doubt that kermes is used in the modern version.

      best regards

      Ivan

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  4. The blue and pink colors are just lovely. Such even colors! I didn't know one could get that nice blue from the cornflowers.

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