126r - - - - - Molding fruits and animals in sugar
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 aigre 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.
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to cast and brittle, and it breaks when dry
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+ In order to mold pears and apples in sugar, do not cast. Rather, fill half of the mold, and then join the two halves, and keep turning it until the sugar is solidified and cold. Do not mix anything in the mold except the reheated plaster, as you know.
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The mold needs to have been soaked in cold water for one full day and night and the mold must be damp when you cast in sugar.
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The sign that the syrup or the melted sugar has boiled enough in the water for casting fruits is when it makes threads when shaking it. And if it passes this point, it will not be good because it will make it damp. If the sugar corrodes itself, throw a bit of amidin in the mold or rub it with an almond.