Very rarely the subject matter contained references to themes from classical antiquity. The first course soteltie at the wedding feast (after 1414) of Hugh Courtenay, Duke of Devonshire (1389-1422) was a sculpture of Ceres, one of the earliest recorded uses of a pagan deity in English art. Brightly painted and gilded, these creations probably resembled the polychrome wooden and alabaster sculpture of the period. Though marzipan (and more rarely sugar) were used in their construction, it is likely that wax was the most frequently employed material.

Unfortunately, no contemporary illustrations of these events have survived in English records. However, a German illustration of a table with sugar figures, for the marriage of Johann Wilhelm, Duke of Jülich and Jacoba of Baden in Düsseldorf in 1585, gives us a rare insight into how extraordinary these displays of artistry must have looked in the sixteenth century.

During the medieval period, most of the sugar that came into Europe passed through the hands of Venetian merchants, as did many Levantine botanical materials such as tragacanth. This was a kind of gum harvested from various species of Goat’s Thorn or Tragacanth shrub (Astragalus spp.) as a binding material for making pills and other medicines from powdered drugs. Raw tragacanth is a ribbon-like exudate that forms on bark wounds on this thorny bush, which grows on arid mountain slopes all over the Eastern Mediterranean. When steeped in water, gum tragacanth or gum dragon, (as it was once known in England), forms a sticky mucilage which allows any powdered material to be converted into a pliable, plasticine-like paste. When dry, it is a beautiful white material with tremendous ornamental possibilities. It can be rolled out wafer-thin and fashioned into delicate petals for artificial flowers, or pressed into carved wooden moulds to create impressive animals or moulded features for sugar buildings. The paste can be coloured readily with dyes and pigments and, when dry, lends itself to painting or gilding.

The earliest printed recipe for gum-paste appeared in a book of secrets compiled by Girolamo Ruscelli, first published in Venice in 1552. Within a few years, Ruscelli’s work had been translated into German, French and English, though the technique he describes seems to have been known to European court confectioners well before this time. An alternative way of making figures and ornamental sugar objects was to pour concentrated sugar syrup into wooden, ceramic or plaster moulds, and allow it to solidify into a candy. Sugar syrup cast in moulds also seems to have been a popular method for creating table ornaments in England and probably pre-dates the use of gum-paste. Even religious votive objects were made using the method.

Sugar-paste is an extremely fine material which can be modelled in the way of clay and, when dry, produce an effect close to that of terracotta, albeit whiter. It can last many years, though as it not fired like a ceramic it will ultimately crumble to pieces on exposure to the atmosphere. Large pieces can be made with the assistance of a framework underneath. The great Renaissance sculptor Jacopo Sansovino designed sugar sculptures for Henry III of France when the king passed through Venice in 1574 on the way to his coronation. A simpler technique, without continual recourse to a professional sculptor or modeller, was through the use of ‘card moulds’. The‘card’ consisted of a wooden block carved on both sides with a number of components. These could be separately pressed out of gum-paste and then assembled to create a small three-dimensional sugar object. Little animals, birds and figures made up from separate parts needed particular attention when assembling. Fine wires were used to support limbs and other vulnerable details, a process described by Jarrin in the nineteenth century. At this point it is clear that the pieces were no longer edible in the everyday sense.

Sugar sculpture could either be left plain white, or painted with colours made by grinding pigments with gum arabic and a little sugar to make the colour shine. Red was made from cochineal or carmine, green from spinach, beet or buckthorn, yellow from saffron or gum gambodge, blue from Prussian blue and black from burnt ivory. When sugar sculpture was intended to be eaten the colours used were of plant or animal origin.

However, there are very few early images of the entremets and sotelties of the courtly table, so we cannot be entirely sure of the true appearance of these medieval and renaissance sugar fantasies. We have to depend for our knowledge of these on written descriptions. It is not until the seventeenth century that detailed illustrations of sugar sculpture start to appear in printed accounts of princely festivals. Many ‘festival books’ of this kind were printed in the great European centres of aristocratic culture, the most lavish and well known, emanating from the court of Louis XIV, such as André Félibien’s Relation de la feste de Versailles printed in Paris in 1676 and illustrated with etchings by Jean Le Pautre (1618-1682). Another account with excellent plates of aristocratic table settings is David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl’s Das grosse Carrosel published in Stockholm in 1685. This was a lavish production illustrated by Georg Christoph Eimmart (1638-1705), with etchings showing a royal feast celebrating the coming of age of King Charles XI of Sweden.