CHAPTER IX
Consuming Wealth and Eating Words: Sugar Paste

 

Anyone who attended a wedding or anniversary party in Britain during the 1980s probably encountered one of the oldest and simplest of sweet confections - sugar paste, or pastillage. This is the brittle, porcelain-like substance used for modelling flowers which garlanded many fashionable celebration cakes. For much of the twentieth century royal icing piped stiffly into formal patterns had been considered proper for these ornaments. Tastes suddenly changed, and in came soft icing, rolled out in sheets, draped, frilled and laced like cloth, sprigged with flowers which looked real, but were made with great artifice from a mixture of sugar, water and gum arabic. 

There are few ideas in confectionery which are absolutely new, so it was no great surprise to find John Murrell in 1617 instructing his readers to make roses from sugar paste. At the start of the eighteenth century Massialot describe how to make flowers from gum paste and slivers of preserved fruit, and in 1751 Gilliers illustrated a confectioner delicately shaping sugar flowers. Some years later, Jarrin illustrated implements for making flowers, moulded in wooden forms, cut with appropriately shaped tin cutters, and modelled with ivory tools.

The popularity of sugar paste itself has waxed and waned as fashions in confectionery went from elaborate to simple and back again. As a medium for modelling figures and buildings, sugar paste probably went into medieval subtleties. It was used for Elizabethan and Jacobean conceits for the banqueting table and provided ornaments for Georgian desserts. In 1820, Jarrin remarked that sculptural sugar work generally had gone out of fashion. A decade or two later, Antonin Carême, one of the most influential nineteenth-century confectioners, revived the art. Sugar paste, gum paste, pulled and spun sugar were all exploited throughout the Victorian era for elaborate pièces montées. Then, once again, elaborate sugar table decorations were regarded with a mixture of derision and awe, only to re-emerge in a baroque flourish of edible floristry on wedding cakes of the 1980s.

Sugar in general has conveyed messages of status and love with more or less subtlety for centuries. Sometimes it said things loud and clear, often to the extent of spelling out the message for anyone who could read it. Right at the end of the nineteenth century, an American confectionery manufacturer advertised a large gum-paste centrepiece for a wedding cake. This was described as ‘consisting of a horseshoe framed by flowers. Below the horseshoe stands a blacksmith forging two rings, which represent marriage. Behind him, on the horseshoe, is the word constancy.’

It is not clear if this centrepiece was intended to be eaten: probably not. The encyclopaedist Theodore Garret made a distinction between edible sugar paste and inedible gum paste. Whilst he considered the latter to have great value: ‘To the artistic confectioner Gum Paste has much the same meaning as clay and marble combined have to the sculptor…there is no form of 
 
decorative construction that cannot be undertaken and successfully carried out by those who understand the manner of its application. It had one great drawback to its use. This, said Garret, was the mistaken notion that ornaments made with gum paste were edible. 

The consumer was not necessarily aware of this inedibility. The trouble was that sugar paste and gum paste might mean the same thing—an edible mixture of sugar and gum. Alternatively, a confectioner might consider that sugar paste and gum paste represented opposite ends of a spectrum, the sugar end being edible, and the gum paste, compounded with starch, plaster of Paris and various suspect colourings, most unpalatable. Confectioners loved modelling with both, and consumers were left to discover edibility by trial and error. Perhaps it was this confusion which led to the general neglect of paste during the modern period.

Apothecaries, meanwhile, found sugar paste useful for delivering (with reasonable accuracy) measured quantities of drugs and tonics. This was a more subtle role, less prone to reversals in taste. Paste eased conversation by soothing sore throats and sweetening the breath for innumerable people through the centuries. So even if the confectioner found his sugar models passés, the apothecary probably found a consistent demand for troches and lozenges. This dual role, as a (sometimes edible) ornamental medium, and a utilitarian base for tablets means that sugar paste has been in constant use since the sixteenth century and probably before. 

Methods for making sugar paste have changed little over the centuries. No boiling of syrup is involved; it is a simple mixture of powdered sugar kneaded with soaked gum arabic or gum tragacanth (often misspelt as dragant, or corrupted to dragon) to bind it into a malleable mass. The two gums, both derived from trees (Acacia and Astralagus species respectively), have been used in sweet-making for centuries. Apothecaries found gums useful when incorporating medicines into tablets, because they slowly released drugs when sucked. More frivolous confectioners concentrated on the ability of gum to bind sugar into pastes which could be modelled like clay, dried, and kept indefinitely. 

Both gums are collected by hand from trees which grow in a wide area across the Sahel, into the Middle East and India. As natural, unrefined products, the quality of gums varies; the colour ranges from almost colourless to amber, and they often have scraps of twig or sand sticking to them. Gums (and resins and latexes), said Harold McGee, ‘are among the more common, more visible, and more mysterious of plant products. They…are composed of long carbohydrate molecules with a limited capacity of holding water and are produced in the walls of certain plant cells: when tissue is broken, the gum flows in to fill the injury, drying to a hard mass when it reaches the air. The pieces have a hard, tough texture, and are irregular in shape and size, from about as big as an orange downwards. For confectionery, gum is broken up into small particles before use. Confectioners have always preferred the paler 
 
grades, and emphasized the necessity for straining after soaking; the old method was to wring the solution through a cloth. 

Gums do not sound a particularly attractive proposition, but their ‘limited capacity of holding water’ is a useful attribute. It means that they can be partially redissolved, mixed into paste, and then dried again. In principle their use is easy. They are soaked in water for about twelve hours, to soften and dissolve as much as possible, then strained, and mixed with sugar. The finer the sugar powder, the whiter the result. Egg white, lemon juice and rosewater were also added in the past. In practice, as ever, there are nuances of quality, especially in the texture, malleability and evenness of colour in the finished paste, the knowledge of which separates experts from amateurs. 

Some gum-based sweets made remain recognizably close to the original opaque confections once made from sugar paste. But a second strand, exploiting gums as transparent setting agents for sugar syrup, was evident by the early nineteenth century. Precedents came from fruit sweets, such as pastes, cotignac and ‘clear cakes’ which relied on pectin and sugar to make them set. Jellies, their texture probably less fragile than modern jelly desserts, but not as stiff as jelly sweets, were also made from gelatine, extracted by boiling calf’s feet and then allowing the liquid to reduce until syrupy. 

By 1820, clear gum and sugar sweets were being made under the name of jujubes, when Jarrin gave this recipe:

    Jujube Paste

    1 pound of Gum Senegal, half a pound of Sugar, Orange Flower Water.

    Take a pound of gum senegal, pound and dissolve it in orange flower water …put it on a slow fire to reduce, and keep stirring it; when it is of the consistence of paste, clarify half a pound of loaf sugar, boil it to a blow, and add it to your paste …dry it to a good consistence; run it into moulds of tin about a quarter inch thick, and place them in a stove. When dry, take out the paste and cut it into small pieces, or any shapes you please.

Jujube paste, he added ‘is in great vogue in France, and on the continent as a medicine for coughs and colds.’ The texture must have been very stiff. Some observers were not complimentary, William Gunter remarking that jujubes reminded him of edible india-rubber. Jujubes were apparently popular as cough-cures throughout the nineteenth century but a wide range of other clear fruit-flavoured confections evolved as well. 

The earliest versions of sugar paste were opaque, and prized for their whiteness. In the past, gums do not appear to have been treasured for any immediately apparent virtue (although there is the ever-present possibility that they were thought of as medicine). They were probably more valued for what they could do when combined with that magical substance, sugar. Creating
 
models was the most remarkable manifestation of this, and some items were useful as well as decorative. One of the earliest known detailed sugar paste recipes in English is for making:
    plate of sugre, whereof a man maye make all manner of fruites, and other fyne thinges with theyr forme, as platters, dishes, glasses, cuppes, and such like thinges, wherewith you may furnishe at table; and when you have doen, eate them up. A pleasant thing for them that sit at table. 
This recipe, given in the translation of the French alchemist Alexis of Piedmont in 1562, required ‘gum dragant’, a piece the size of a bean, steeped in rosewater, a walnut shell full of lemon juice and some egg white mixed with sugar in a mortar, which was kneaded with more powdered fine sugar to make a paste. This was rolled out and moulded into tableware. The word ‘plate’, at this time, could simply mean a thin rigid sheet of something, and ‘sugar plate’ was a term which had been used in English since the fourteenth century. But this recipe shaped it into plate in a more complex sense as well, in imitation of vessels for food. A good display of these, especially when made from precious metal, was an overt sign of wealth. Given that sugar was still not cheap in the sixteenth century, fragile platters and cups of sugar paste, broken and consumed when the meal was over, were a remarkable piece of conspicuous consumption. It was the sixteenth-century equivalent of lighting cigars with banknotes.

The idea of edible tableware must have been considered an amusing and stylish conceit for some decades. Sugar plate had great advantages. It was lightweight, thin and elegantly white, especially in comparison to the heavy earthenware pottery with dark glazes that was common in Britain into the seventeenth century. Even imported majolica and Delft, though pale and patterned, was relatively thick. It was only when Chinese porcelain was imported and imitated in large quantities in the eighteenth century that something with the delicacy of sugar plate became available in more lasting form. So, for a while, confectioners, and rich ladies giving sugar banquets, must have continued to make their sugar plate. 

The basic recipe stayed essentially unchanged, but the details were refined. Sir Hugh Plat, in his instructions for ‘the making of Sugar-plate, and casting thereof in carved moulds,’ demanded the whitest refined sugar and a small proportion of the best starch, mixed with gum dragant. This, he said, ‘must first bee well picked, leaving out the drosse,’ before it was steeped in rosewater and strained through canvas. All ingredients were mixed up with some egg white and then rolled out and shaped in wooden moulds dusted with powdered sugar. For making ‘sawcers, dishes, boawls, &c’ the sheets of paste were pressed into the required vessels, trimmed, and allowed to dry partially, then unmoulded and the edges gilded with gold leaf stuck down 
 
with white of egg.

Sugar plate could be coloured and scented with flowers. By using the results judiciously, the confection could be given the appearance of fine marble (yet another sign of substance) as in this recipe from A Queen’s Delight:

    To make paste of flowers the colour of marble, tasting of the natural flowers

    Take every sort of pleasing Flowers, as Violets, Cowslips, Gilly-flowers, Roses or Marigolds, and beat them in a Mortar, each flower by it self with sugar, till the sugar become the colour of the flower, then put in a little Gum Dragon steept in water into it, and beat it into a perfect paste; and when you have half a dozen colours, every flower will take of his nature, then rowl the paste therein, and lay one piece upon another, in mingling sort, so rowl your Paste in small rowls, as big and as long as your finger, then cut it off the bigness of a small Nut, overthwart, and so rowl them thin, that you may see a knife through them, so dry them before the fire till they be dry.

This is a very simple idea which can easily be made, although modern tastes might veer towards fruit flavours. It provided yet another conceit, imitating the expensive and inedible with something deliciously consumable. Flavoured pastes might also be left unmixed and cut into little diamond shapes, or moulded in imitation of something else. Paste coloured and flavoured with cinnamon and ginger, according to the author of A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen, was rolled out thin and ‘then you may turne it upon stickes made of peeces of arrowes, and make them hollow like Cynamon stickes.’

Numerous ornamental, but less obviously edible items were made with paste. John Murrell listed ‘Shooes, Slippers, Keyes, Knives, Gloves &c’. Larger, more elaborate ornaments in the tradition of subtleties were also possible. Robert May spoke with regret of models of a castle, a ship, and a stag with an arrow in its side (although these were all made from a baked paste, probably a type of coarse pastry), but implied that such frivolities were no longer considered amusing. 

The eighteenth century saw a flowering of ornaments and table decorations: sugar paste carefully cut, sculpted, stuck together and coloured by confectioners. Gilliers, in 1751, showed how to construct and lay out elaborate rococo dessert tables, with parterres of sugar work stocked with sweetmeats. Paste was an important structural material for these displays. But at the outset of the following century, Jarrin commented that, ‘this mode of decoration and embellishment was once in great vogue, and the most magnificent and costly ornaments have been made of gum paste; but it has fallen comparatively into disuse, and what is worse for the confectioner, the fragments of the art have been transferred to pastry cooks and cooks.’ It is obvious that he personally found paste sculpture an interesting skill. Perhaps it was nostalgia that moved him to include a detailed section on making gum and other pastes. It was, he said, an art which required ‘great care, dexterity, 
 
much patience, some knowledge of mythology, of history, and of the arts of modelling and design—qualifications seldom possessed by the mere pastry cook.’

Jarrin’s formulae ranged from the entirely edible fine gum paste and common gum paste (which included starch) through ones including plaster and oil ‘fit only for gilding or bronze,’ to an ‘Alabaster Paste which will resist Damp, and all sorts of Insects’ (which makes one wonder about the storage facilities available to confectioners). He used his pastes for modelling flowers, fruit, shells, animals and figures. Jarrin lived long enough to see the art of sculpting with sugar mixtures successfully revived by Carême in the 1830s, renewing a vogue for Chinese temples, hermit’s caves, Turkish grottoes and other unlikely ornaments of the table. This did not entirely die out until after the First World War.

Thematic sculptures were doubtless hot topics of conversation to enliven the ennui of a banquet. Some carried mottoes to explain their subjects more fully. But in the early seventeenth century, sugar paste got involved with much more direct communication by conveying script. John Murrell gave these instructions for ‘Cinnamon Letters’:

    Take paste…colour it with cinnamon, and rowle it in long rowles, as neere as you can all of a bignesse, and therof make faire capitall Romane letters…gild them and make a crosse in the beginning of them.
An alphabet mix cut from pastel sugar paste can still be bought in shops supplying sweets for small children. Letter shapes (now made from chocolate) remain a Christmas novelty in Holland. The paste was originally flavoured with musk and ambergris, which must have made it very attractive, and suggests it was not just intended for children. Stronger perfumes than flowers were, perhaps, a necessity to sweeten the breath after too many sugar banquets. Kissing comfits, as detailed by Robert May in 1685, were sugar paste containing musk, civet, ambergris, and orris powder. These were printed in moulds or rolled into little pellets and then squeezed flat with a seal. Similar little floral cachous lasted well into the twentieth century (even now, scented purple ‘Parma Violet’ sweets are made as a line for small girls: kissing-comfits for dolls’ tea-parties).

Messages more elaborate than single letters were also combined with paste. Hannah Glasse gave instructions, ‘to make little things of sugar, with devices in them. These were made from pieces of sugar paste, tinted whatever colour was preferred, ‘in what shapes you like…in the middle of them have little pieces of paper, with some pretty smart sentences wrote on them; they will in company make much mirth.’

It was at the end of the nineteenth century that writing and paste really 
 
became a popular combination, in a vogue for ‘conversation lozenges’. Those who were tongue-tied could always offer their companion a little piece of sugar paste printed with some suitable inscription. ‘‘How do you flirt?’ Can you polka?’ and ‘Love me’ were amongst those available from Terry’s in York; for those wanting to make a really positive response, a large medallion moulded with a heart and the words ‘I will’ was available. Another ‘novelty’ was reminiscent of Hannah Glasse’s little things with devices in them. As advertised by the firm of Thomas Handisyde in the East End of London, these were ‘Handisydes SECRET CHARMS suck carefully and the secret message will appear’. Handisyde produced various shapes and sizes of conversation lozenges, the larger ones cut in hearts, circles, and elegant oblongs with ogee edges. The Temperance Movement used the idea of motto lozenges to promote their message. ‘Drink is the ruin of man’, ‘Hard work does not need intoxicating liquor’, and ‘Sobriety is the sure way to riches’ were apparently inscribed on paste. The inscriptions were added to the sweets by printing the tops with stamps dipped in dyes. 

Accurately measured, carefully mixed and rolled, sugar paste could be divided into lozenges which contained, within reasonable margins of error, a prescribed dose of some drug. By the late nineteenth century, everything from opium (the most potent painkiller), to lettuce (the mildest of soporifics) was conveyed in lozenges, as was ipecacuanha (to make the patient sick), rhubarb (a laxative) and ginger (to comfort the stomach, perhaps necessary after the others had been administered). Both confectioners and apothecaries mixed their own versions of medicinal lozenges, often with combinations of perfumes or drugs which they kept secret. Few of these confections survive, although the extra-strong mint lozenges still made by Terry’s of York had their origins in this tradition, as did ‘paregoric’—a patent cough medicine which originally contained opium and chloroform. (The similar tablets now available are ‘paregoric flavour’, as the active ingredients can no longer be freely sold.)

The handwork involved in making lozenges was skilled but tedious. At the end of the nineteenth century, their manufacture underwent rapid industrialization. The problem with hand-mixing paste was getting exactly the right consistency with the minimum of handling. On this subject, Skuse said (round about 1890) that he felt,

    quite unequal to the task of making lozenge makers of his readers; the process is simple enough, but it requires practice…Young beginners, when trying to make lozenges will generally find that what they intended for a nice white peppermint lozenge will turn out, when dry, to have a sort of greyish brown tint; this is caused simply through the sugar being handled and coddled about.
He advised beginners to start on cough lozenges, where the addition of dark 
 
ingredients meant pallor was not important. But, he added, there was little need for hand-made lozenges, except as high class goods, because 
    recent machinery has rendered lozenge making by hand…a dead letter. Twenty years ago, lozenges were mixed and cut by journeymen confectioners…within the last few years, machinery has been introduced which mixes, rolls, stamps and cuts, all the manual labour that is required is simply a superintendent…turning out many hundredweights a day.
A few years later, in his tenth edition, Skuse gave details of the ‘Climax’ machine which made two or three tons of lozenges in a day, and needed mixers and kneading brakes to supply it. 
******

About this time, the clear gum and jelly category of confectionery began to expand. Two successes were Fruit Gums and Fruit Pastilles, introduced by Rowntrees. Both originated in the late nineteenth century, when Rowntrees employed a French master confectioner to develop their lines; such sweets are said to have been a French monopoly at this time. Another was Wine Gums, which have never had anything to do with alcohol, and were invented in 1909 by a Methodist teetotaller. 

Pharmacists created new vehicles for administering the drugs formerly contained in sweetened lozenges, and twentieth-century developments in making gum paste show, in common with many sweets, two complementary characteristics. The first is that the sweet itself becomes softer; the second that technology is harnessed to produce ever-larger volumes. 

Soft pastes are now made with agents which have different capacities for holding water, and different textures—chewy or short or soft. These include pectin (derived from fruit), gelatine (replacing isinglass, sometimes used in the past), or any one of a modern panoply of modified starches designed to gel, boil, congeal and chew in a specified way, and sometimes replacing gum altogether. These have given sweet-making ‘cream paste’ (whose softer texture is provided by glucose and gelatine). It is the component which provides the colourful ‘building-brick’ look, built up in layers in Liquorice Allsorts and Dolly Mixtures; it also provides centres for some soft comfits, and has spawned a range of ‘chews’ of the Opal Fruit type. 

Technology has contributed both to marketing and production of sweets which originated from sugar paste confections. It has made all aspects of retailing easier through the development of ‘roll wrapping’, (introduced in the USA in about 1915). This is the method by which a column of little disc-shaped sweets is encased in foil, swaddled with a paper label, and dropped into a carton or encased in a plastic outer. Problems of keeping the sweets clean and dry, preventing them abrading and chipping, and easing distribution and display were solved in a trice. 
 
 
Technology also contributed a new category of ‘tablets’ to paste sweets. These still rely on sugar, flavourings, and binder such as gelatine, but the ingredients are mixed into doughs and granulated, or ‘slugged’ by compressing the mixture first into large tablets, and then breaking them into granules to dry. Slugging is a dry process, allowing the addition of volatile ingredients, such as sherbet powder, to the mixture. The sweets are given their final form by compressing the mix under pressure in tabletting machines which shape small portions of granulated mixture in polished dies. The use of the latter has freed paste from the flat lozenge shape and the slightly rough surface, to give concave dimples and a smooth sleek gloss to Refreshers, and a ring or ‘lifesaver’ (life-belt) shape to Polos and Navy Mints. Despite this, the art (or science) of confectionery is too conservative to allow all that has gone before to vanish under the onslaught of the machine. Words and little sentences are now compressed with the sugar to make ‘Love Hearts’, for little girls to giggle and flirt with
    Be Mine, My Gal, Marry Me, Love, You Alone, Yours, Heart Throb, My Angel, Wake Up, OK Toots, Funny Face, Always, Grow Up.…
The language, perhaps, lacks the elegance of English in previous centuries, but the idea is straight from the banquet-table.
 

RECIPES

Sugar plate

500g icing sugar; 15g powdered gum arabic or gum tragacanth; flavours and colours as desired. By all means experiment with kneading the petals of edible flowers into the mixture if they are available (make sure they have not been treated with pesticides); otherwise, use rose water, orange flower water, vanilla essence, or oils from lemon, orange or lime peel.

    Mix the icing sugar and gum together roughly, and then sieve into a large bowl so that the two are well amalgamated. Then divide the dry mix into portions, (keeping a little back for working) depending on how many colours and flavours you want. Make each portion into paste by adding a drop of colour and the desired flavouring; if using one of the flower waters, add this in teaspoonfuls, mixing and kneading until you have a pliable paste. If using an essence or an oil, add a drop or two, and then make the paste up with ordinary water. Knead each portion well until it is smooth and coherent, adding a little more icing sugar/gum mixture or water as necessary to achieve a good consistency. Wrap each batch in clingfilm until you need it.
Then make up into little rolls, putting two or more flavours together in layers as desired, and cut down into little nuggets. Dust a board and pin with icing sugar, roll out, cut into any shape desired, and leave to dry.
 
 
Murrel’s Cinnamon Letters
    Use bought petal paste, kneaded with a few drops of rosewater and a little ground cinnamon, or make up paste as directed in the recipe above. 

    Extra icing sugar will be needed for shaping. Gold leaf to decorate (optional).

    Divide the paste into pieces about the size of a walnut and roll out. Shape into letters as desired. Make small cuts, about 5mm long into the paste at the start and end of each letter: then open the paste out to give serifs. Dry on a wire rack, and gild if desired.