Sugar Pulling and Sugar Blowing by Ewald Notter
June 11, 2009
Any book by Ewald Notter, Swiss Master Confectioner, is the top of the craft – he is one of the world’s greatest sugar artists, with awe-inspiring technique and imagination.
This was a gift from my mentor, George Wagner, who taught me some of these techniques using poured sugar. Written in German, English, and French, the book is very detailed, with lots of pictures and instructions, yielding phenomenal and inspirational results. Every time I open this book I just go, ‘Wow!’ – such brilliant advanced work, the result of decades of commitment and practice. Notter is a ‘natural’, one of those true phenomenae that comes along every few decades, creating beautiful work to dumbfound us all. I would love to attend his school, but I just can’t afford it.
Here is an example of his masterwork – Madame de Pompadour. Look at the details of her renaissance-era dress, completely constructed of blown and pulled sugar!
Everything is explained in fastidious detail – this Madame de Pompadour, for example, takes eight full pages of detailed directions, with 17 color photographs. The book includes a lot of detailed analysis, such as a section on the human face – Notter gives us a grid of how to make a face, then shows lots of easy ways to make the face look different, in very practical fashion.
Absolutely invaluable to anyone interested in the arts of sugar work – my total recommendation!
Fabulous work, of course – but Mme de Pompadour was from the Age of Enlightenment – the 1750′s. The Renaissance was about 300 years earlier than that.