Wax Flowers and Leaves
From Cooking for profit, 1886
Serves 1
This method can be used to create various shapes and is best for beginners to start with small flowers and leaves.
Presented as published in 1886. Historical recipes may not meet modern food-safety standards. Cook from the modern interpretation below, not the original instructions.
A modern interpretation · AI-generated from the original record
Ingredients
Method
As published
This recipe was extracted from Cooking for profit (1886) by Jessup Whitehead, page 339. The excerpt below is the record exactly as published.
a carrot or turnip or potato, dipping it into melt- ed wax and taking off the thin cover- ing of wax that the vegetable shape has taken up. Wax impressions are thinner and finer than stearine, and wax can be pulled gently off of in- tricate shapes where any other ma- terial would break to pieces. Veget- ables make the best shapes because wax will not adhere too tightly and they must be kept wet. Supposing Mrs. Butcher, men- tioned in the catalogue as having special skill m such work to have carved a white turnip into the form of a rose and the end of a carrot into the shape and markings of a rose leaf, the next step would be to throw them into a pan of water and then melt some white wax in a tin cup. Take up the turnip rose, dip the face of it in the wax, then immediately in the cold water again and a thin pearly waxen rose can be pulled off the vegetable; dip the leaf -shaped carrot the same way and you have a waxen leaf. The wax must not be very hot. When it is cool enough to be on the point of setting, the 188 COOKING FOR PROFIT, leaves and flowers can be made with the greatest rapidity, sometimes drop- ping from the shape of themselves. By the same method fan-leaves, palms, bells, grape bunches, cups, thimbles, stars, faces, animals' heads, spear heads, cornices and mouldings can be made in great variety within certain restrictions which will soon be discovered upon trial, such as the impracticability of making a round ball-shaped flower, unless in two halves. It is best for a beginner to make a large number of very small flowers and leaves
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