Subtlety

In the New Year gift-giving ceremony of 1589, Elizabeth I was presented with a spectacular gift: a sculpture, made entirely of sugar. The Queen and her courtiers would have immediately recognised this fantastical structure as a subtlety, a sugar ornament customarily served at banquets for the elite. This particular sculpture depicted England’s patron saint, St George, in miniature sugared form. Mere months after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, this sugar subtlety was a statement of English political power and Protestant supremacy, as well as a tactical suppression of the still significant Spanish threat of the late 1580s. That such sugared props had manipulative and performative potential in the early modern period is illuminated by a moment in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), as the usurped Duke Prospero conjures up subtleties as part of a banquet that magically disappears before his enemies’ eyes. The vanishing subtleties of Prospero’s banquet are part of a larger series of sugared performances sprinkled throughout the play that conceal as much as they reveal. Like those of Elizabeth I, the subtleties of Prospero expose royal power as the product of a deceptive and fragile mimesis: ‘you do yet taste, / Some subtleties o’th’isle, that will not let you / Believe things certain’ (5.1.123-125).

Arnold van Westerhout, after Giovanni Battista Lenardi. ‘Two sculptures in sugar of Juno and Cybele drawn in carriages, representing two of the four elements, as used for the banquet offered by the Earl of Castlemaine on 14 January 1687’. Etching. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

A subtlety is just one of many saccharine signifiers borrowed from the worlds of poetics and performance which point to sugar’s abilities to tell stories. As we shall see, a dark story of subjugation, slavery, and race-craft is an intrinsic part of sugar’s own history, a subaltern narrative enabling a European tale of luxury, art, and refinement. Sugar is a born storyteller. As Miriam Jacobson points out, sugar’s protean nature, its ability to be coloured, carved, printed, and metamorphosed, meant it could be manipulated to form a variety of artistic fantasies. Subtleties were a kind of food theatre, a display of mechanical ingenuity, invested in economies of artifice, illusion, and mimetic play. Miniature culinary conceits were often explicitly poetic. Hugh Plat’s recipe for a subtlety in A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen (1604) is particularly playful. The subtlety looks like a walnut, but, when cracked, one ‘shall find…a prettie Posey written’ inside what is really a sugar shell painted to look like a real-life walnut (C2r-C2v).

With this in mind, we can begin to see why sugar sculptures were referred to as subtleties in the early modern period. While the original source of the term is unclear, there are clues to suggest why sugar became associated with ideas around subtlety. In the sixteenth century, a subtlety could refer to a demonstration of skill or ingenuity in workmanship or design or a display of wit, which maps onto sugar sculptures, cunning in conceit. As Ken Albala has observed, other foods in dietary literature were referred to as subtle if they possessed a light humour and quick spirits. It was believed this quality would positively affect one’s ability to reason, enhancing the intellect. Sugar, as a void food, lacking any real nutritional referent, possessed this subtle quality. The subtlety evidently possessed a hinterland of associations with sophistication and elite self-fashioning, a suitable signifier for sugar: a commodity historically coveted in the medieval period as an exotic and expensive spice and sweetener available only to the richest in England. By the time of Elizabeth’s I gift-giving ceremony of 1589, many of the English populus were experiencing their first taste of the sweet stuff.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the commodity became gradually more available and affordable in England, and, increasingly, subject to a feminized discourse of expertise. Knowledge around sugar-work and confectionery trickled down the social classes, circulating in recipe books in manuscript and print form. These recipe books contained instructions on how to make sugar fine and subtle as it was refined and melted to form sugar syrup. Sugar was manipulated under the watchful eye of elite gentlewomen and mercantile housewives, themselves displaying subtle talents of skill and ingenuity in their handling of this protean material. The manuscript receipt book of Elizabeth Bulkeley (1627) notes the material stages of sugar syrup boiling: ‘let it boile till it / Doth drawe betwixt your fingers like a thred’, ‘let it boile vntill it rope between / your fingers like a bird lime’ (fol.25r); ‘suger will flie from your knife like a feather’ (fol. 25v). Bulkeley’s colourful similes encapsulate the subtlety’s associations with delicacy and dexterity, qualities that have survived into our modern understanding of what subtle qualities might signify.

Subtlety’s praiseworthy connotations had a darker side. It was also used to describe a ‘cunning or crafty scheme; an artifice; a trick; a clever stratagem’ (OED 3a), or, when applied to a person, to suggest someone who possessed deceitful or treacherous qualities. One can see how women of the elite and middling classes involved with sugar-work could be seen as creators of artifice. Recipe books of the period are filled with instructions on how to create culinary feats of deception. Gervase Markham’s The English Husvvife (1615), for instance, instructs readers on how to serve a milk pudding in an ‘outlandish fashion’ by disguising it ‘as a leg of mutton’, the pudding sewn inside the mutton’s skin (56-7). Hugh Plat’s Delightes for Ladies (1602) provides a recipe for serving sugar as ‘Rabbets, Pigeons, or any other little birde or beast’, and dressing it up so it looks like savoury meat. This way, he declares, ‘a banquet may bee presented in the form of a supper’, a ‘verie rare and strange deuise’ (B4r). The threads and feathers of such recipes imaginatively morph into webs and traps, as the slipperiness of a subtlety contingently moves along an increasingly dubious spectrum of wit, refinement, artistry, artifice, and deception.

Far away from the English housewife’s table, in the cane fields of Brazil, and later, the Caribbean, a very different narrative was unfolding. As socially mobile English women created subtleties in their kitchens, requiring the increasing use of sugar, they became implicated in another kind of subtlety, a much larger network of activity that we now recognise as morally reprehensible — that is, the global systems of entrapment and bondage which characterised the transatlantic slave trade, fuelled by the increasing consumption of sugar across the social scale in England. Kim Hall and Gitanjali Shahani have mapped women’s participation in these developing colonial economies, calling for us to recognise how English women’s culinary labour and the production of sugar by enslaved workers in the New World are inextricably linked. Slavery is an unavoidable part of the history of sugar, and thus of subtleties, in the early modern period.

Kara Walker. A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, Domino Sugar Factory, New York, 2014. © Creative Time, New York.

In 2014, Kara Walker created a sphinx-like sculpture of white sugar in the abandoned Sugar Refining factory in Brooklyn, New York. It is a work which speaks poignantly to the entwinement of empire, power, exploitation, race, and the slave trade in sugar production across the centuries. As Walker states, she wished to pay homage to ‘the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World’. Entering the factory, the walls dripping with molasses, visitors experience a sweet and appealing aroma, which soon turns to sickliness as the history behind that alluring sweetness sinks in, as they are faced with the realities of a slave trade that ‘traded sugar for bodies and bodies for sugar’ (Walker). The piece powerfully employs the dualities of sugar as a material which can tell a captivating and intriguing story, but one that also conceals and deceives. It is little surprise that Walker decided to name this piece ‘A Subtlety’.

Bethan Davies is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton.

Selected Bibliography.

Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
Bulkeley, Elizabeth. A boke of hearbes and receipts. ca. 1627. Wellcome Collection. MS 169.
Hall, Kim. ‘Sugar and Status in Shakespeare’, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, vol. 145 (2009), pp. 49-61.
Jacobson, Miriam. Barbarous Antiquities: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
Lawson, Jane A., ed. The Elizabethan New Year's Gift Exchanges, 1559-1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Markham, Gervase. the English Husvvife. (London: 1615).
Plat, Hugh. Delightes for Ladies, to Adorne their Persons, Tables, Closets, and Distillatories. With beauties, banquets, perfumes and waters. (London: 1602).
---. A Closet for Ladies and Gentlevvomen. (London: 1608).
Shahani, Gitanjali G. Tasting Difference: Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature (New York: Cornell University Press, 2020).
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest, 3rd ed, eds. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2011).
Walker, Kara. ‘A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby’. Creative Time Projects. New York: 2014, https://creativetime.org/projects/karawalker/, accessed 12.12.21.

10 March 2022.