Sugar sculpture continued to be made in the late nineteenth century, but increasingly it was out of step with developments in art and fashions in dining. By the 1850s most households had adopted the new fashion of service à la russe, imported from Russia, whereby each dish was carved or jointed at the sideboard and served individually in succession, although it required more servants and cutlery. Table decorations began to take the form of flower decoration and comports of fruit that we know today. There was now little demand for the fanciful porcelain figures of the eighteenth century for dessert decoration, and by 1835 the German writer Eichendorff records a last sight of them on display during the preparations for a country birthday party, in a garden room: ‘a long table was already decorated for the celebration, colourful confectionery shimmered between the artfully folded napkins, in the middle was a magnificent, old fashioned centrepiece with wax orange trees and porcelain figures of gods, which were reflected in the mirrored plateau below as if in a lake’.

Sugar sculpture was now reserved for the ultimate ‘luxury’ of kings and princes, whose wealth supported taste that tended to the elaborate. Throughout the nineteenth and into the early years of the twentieth century, most court confectioners and chefs were inspired by Carême’s elaborate approach to presentation. Many of the great chefs had been his students, including Eustace Ude, Charles Elme Francatelli and Jules Gouffe, who all had a profound admiration for their master. In the entire history of gastronomy, food preparation had never been so complex and mould dependant. As well as sugar-paste, every kind of comestible was skilfully transformed into works of art - ice creams in the form of courting doves, jellies that sliced into royal coats of arms and intricate socles moulded from lard. These excesses reached their apogee during the Second Empire of Napoleon III (1852-1871). The most influential chef/confectioner during this period was Urbain Dubois, who together with his colleague Emile Bernard, became chef de cuisine to Wilhelm I of Prussia. At Wilhelm’s court, the two French masters designed and created intricate foods and sugar sculpture that reflected the Kaiser’s two favourite pastimes, hunting and warfare. In their co-authored book, La Cuisine Classique, published in Paris in 1864, they illustrated some of their remarkable sugar-work and food sculpture.They created gum-paste gothic spires for the emperor nearly two metres high and extraordinary entrees mounted on socles, moulded from a fine white suet rendered down from the fat around calves kidneys. These extraordinary structures were constructed on armatures made from pasteboard. The fat was probably pushed into the same kind of wooden moulds that were used for pressing sugar paste ornaments.

The First World War put paid to this manner of dining, as it did to so many social fashions that had lasted centuries. A vivid account can be read in the autobiography of the royal cook, Gabriel Tschumi, who started at Buckingham Palace in the reign of Queen Victoria, continued with Edwardian excesses into the twentieth century, and then lost his job during the downsizing during the Depression of the 1930s. When he started work in 1898, Buckingham Palace employed over 300 people; this went down to 200 on the accession of Edward VII in 1901, and with the Depression went down to 180. However, the Edwardian period can hardly be described as a period of retrenchment, and he remembers the extravagance of the Edwardian period, when even dishes of salmon, foie gras or pheasant were thrown away if they were not absolutely perfect. He is explicit on the skills of the confectioners before the First World War, when they might spend three days to make a sugar basket of sugar paste, measuring 6 by 4 inches, and concludes ‘I have never seen such skills and craftsmanship as that of the Palace confectioners during King Edward’s reign’ .The real shock came with the First World War, when breakfast for the royal family was reduced from eight courses to two.

Sugar sculpture seems to have ceased gracing the tables of the rich after the First World War. However, many married couples will remember their most vivid and encounter with sugar sculpture in the form of a three tier wedding cake, celebrating their personal happiness rather than their political stance, a descendant of a tradition that began several hundred years ago.