1/12^th Scale Georgian food

The later Georgian dinner table was by 1800 very colourful with its porcelain hand painted dinner service and mirror plateaux.  These had become very fashionable by the mid 18th Century. Starting out with elaborate 'parterres' (formal garden patterns) made of marizpan, coloured sugar or sand and decorated with white sugar paste figures and moving on as the century progressed to elaborate tableaux featuring cottages, temples and landscapes in barley sugar, sugar paste or wax.   Then moving from sugar paste, early figurines were made in biscuit (unglazed white) porcelain, before long these gave way to coloured decorated porcelain  coming from famous factories, both in England and abroad, including Minton, Sevres and Meissen.

This type of centrepeice not only reflected light from the table candles but held small individual sweetmeat dishes in silver or decorated china for each guest and small bowls of flowers sometimes fresh, some in wax or sugar paste, these later evolved into the small ceramic posy bowls which eventually, along with the china figurines, moved from the table to Victorian mantlepieces and 'What nots' when the table fashion moved on to larger central flower arrangements for upper class dining.

Although the elaborate centre decorations were still popular for grand Royal dinners and State Occasions,  one plateaux used by the Prince of Wales in 1811 ran the whole length of the tables set for 200 people and  in 1817 at a banquet again for the Prince Regent, the famous French Chef Careme created a "Tableaux en Plateaux" which included the ruins of Antioch, a Syrian Hermitage, a Turkish Mosque and a Chinese Hermitage, using a variety of materials to construct these pieces from lumps of lard to spun sugar.