At a conference a few months ago I heard a presentation on a popular kind of craft in Japan: making little sculptures of sweets from felt material.

I had never heard of this before, but it’s quite popular. If you do a search on “felt sweets” on Etsy, you’ll come up with many different examples. Some of the examples are cute and whimsical, but some are also quite lifelike.

There is a long tradition in Japan of making what are essentially food sculptures. It’s the same sort of sculptures that show up when they bring around the desert tray at an upscale restaurant in America. In Japan, the tradition is for much of the food to be in sculpture form so potential customers can see it.

American restaurants don’t have that tradition, but there was a tradition in one part of American culture of making wax food. In the 1800s, it was common for middle- and upper-class women to make wax sculptures of food.

The tradition has died out in America today, but 150 years ago it was common enough to show up in books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Mark Twain wrote:

On the table in the middle of the room was a kind of a lovely crockery basket that had apples and oranges and peaches and grapes piled up in it, which was much redder and yellower and prettier than real ones is, but they warn’t real because you could see where pieces had got chipped off and showed the white chalk, or whatever it was, underneath.

Dorothy Moss wrote about the tradition of making wax parlor art in the winter, 2004, issue of the journal Gastronomica.  By making wax fruit or other foods middle- and upper-class women learned both science and art. They learned science in their minute examinations of the fruit they were modeling: although they made a plaster cast of the subject, they spent quite a bit of time working over the wax sculpture with a modeling pin, making “wilted, bruised, and over-ripened areas” (as Moss writes) to mimic nature. The art lesson came in with the overall composition: the goal was to make something as naturalistic and real as possible, not something perfect and balanced.

The art of making wax parlor art eventually fell from favor as women had other ways to learn about botany and art, and as more and more women entered the workforce. The wax parlor art pieces required lots of time to make, and as women’s roles changed over time women simply didn’t have the time anymore. Making felt desert pieces today is something of an extension of that art, just in a different medium.