Sugar Paste

sugar paste a mixture of icing sugar, water, and gum tragacanth made into a malleable paste. Glycerine, gelatin, and liquid glucose are sometimes added as well, for a more robust mixture. The paste can be rolled, shaped, coloured, and painted as the user’s imagination dictates, and then allowed to set and dry, giving edible ornaments that will keep indefinitely, provided they do not get damp. Paste-type mixtures are also used for making sweets, especially mints. Variations on sugar paste, more or less inedible, include starch or plaster of Paris amongst their ingredients, and are intended purely for decoration.

In the modern kitchen, sugar paste has been reduced to a minor role as a medium for decorating celebration cakes. It is rolled into a sheet to cover the cake itself, and made into flowers and figures. Modern cake decorators value sugar paste for its clothlike qualities, and the way it can be draped, frilled, and worked to resemble embroidery. The relative ease with which sugar paste can be worked has made it a rival to royal icing, which requires more practice and technical skill if it is to produce good effects.

This usage gives little clue to the historical importance of sugar paste as a sculptural medium for executing elaborate culinary fantasies. Sugar paste has long been valued by confectioners for the plastic qualities it displays, and the hard porcelain-like manner in which it sets. However, the date at which sugar paste first made an appearance in the repertoire of the confectioner is unknown. Primitive versions may have been employed in making medieval subtleties, elaborate and partially edible sculptures used in feasts. Recipes for pastillage, made from sugar and water-softened gum tragacanth, appear in the earliest French confectionery manuals, published by the quack doctors and alchemists Alexis of Piedmont and Michel de Nostradamus in 1555.

From then on, through the 16th and 17th centuries, sugar paste was a favourite device of confectioners for decorating the banquet table. It could be pressed into dishes and allowed to dry, and then unmoulded to give edible crockery, thinner and whiter than any products of the 17th-century European potters. It could be modelled and moulded to imitate fruits, or shaped into birds and animals. Sheets of paste were pressed into two halves of moulds, filled with comfits, and stuck together, to provide a surprise for the diners. Little scraps of paste were perfumed to make ‘kissing comfits’ to sweeten the breath, or cut into lozenges.

Throughout the 18th century, sugar paste enjoyed a vogue as a medium for making decorations from simple flowers to magnificent and costly sculptures for the dining tables of the rich. These were often designed to make flattering references to the abilities or interests of the guests. Jarrin (1827) described how, whilst working in Paris, he had made a group, 2' (60 cm) in height, of Napoleon ‘led by Victory, attended by several allegorical figures, which were intended to express the various high qualities so liberally attributed to Napoleon by the French so long as success attended him’.

Sculpting in sugar paste was evidently a declining art in the early 19th century, for Jarrin complained that the technique had fallen into disuse and that residual fragments of the art had been transferred to the pastry-cooks. This state of affairs was shortly to be remedied by the great Antonin carême, a chef whose influence extended far beyond his native France, and who is said to have remarked that ‘The fine arts are five in number: music, painting, sculpture, poetry and architecture—whereof the principal branch is confectionery.’ His interest in the ‘architectural’ possibilities offered by sugar paste established a lasting fashion for immense sculptural table decorations, ranging from a simple cornucopia to models of famous cathedrals. ‘To the artistic confectioner Gum Paste has much the same meaning as clay and marble combined have to the sculptor,’ gushed Garrett (c.1895). Sugar paste was augmented with pulled boiled sugar; ice, lard, and butter also provided materials for the cook-sculptor. This fashion for elaborate table decorations lasted until the demise of haute cuisine in the 1930s.

Confectioners continued to make paste sweets, initially using paste rolled into sheets and cut, later developing machinery for making ‘compressed tablets’ using paste mixtures. Some of these, such as medicinal lozenges and scented cachous, declined in popularity in the 20th century; but others, such as mints and sherbet, are still consumed enthusiastically.