Recipe

Sugar is fatty, and, with it, round things and large muscles are cast well but fine and delicate things [are cast with] difficulty. However, try well-purified sugar . The plaster mold must be soaked in water for a full night or a full day before casting sugar so that it [the mold] is saturated with water and does not soak up the syrup [the sugar mixture]. The [plaster] mold must also be stripped very well from it [the sugar ], because sugar is sour and brittle. Thus, do not cast anything with sugar which is not stripped easily from it, and which can not be neatly molded in two parts to open as will be needed. If you want to mold a grape, you must get it when it is very fresh; because if it is withered, it [the cast] will look the same. See to it, thus, that you make your molds in the natural season for each thing [fruit]. Grapes that one wants to cast in sugar are man-made, either with wax or earth or with grapes molded with melted wax , on some dish [plaste & chose pleine] in a way so that they are pressed closely together and easily stripped from it. And only a half [of the grapes] should be molded. Or, if you have some of those grapes called chauches or sauvignons which have well-pressed grapes, set half of the grapes in the dish of clay , and cast on the other half, and if any grape is not stripped from it, pluck it out. Note that a grape whose grapes are set apart and separated cannot mold well in either sugar or metal because the ends of the cluster are so fine.
Similarly, if the grape is kept, that it cannot hold the bunched grapes. Therefore, a hollow should be cast, which you will not be capable of if the grape is not close together and without having them spread apart.

Protocol

List of Materials

Sugar
Water
Syrup
Plaster
Wax
Earth
Metal

Related Recipes

Lab Notes

Field Notes

Annotations for 126R

Groups A and C found that the plaster needed more time to soak in water than the recipe indicated