Delirium of Scale
Inside the weird, wonderful world of food-miniatures in Britain. Words by Emily Kenway.
Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Each Monday we publish a different piece of writing related to food, whether it’s an essay, a dispatch, a polemic, a review, or even poetry. In today’s essay, Emily Kenway writes about food-miniatures, ‘miniacs’, and the various meanings stacked within tiny models of edible and inedible food.
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Delirium of Scale
Inside the weird, wonderful world of food miniatures in Britain. Words by Emily Kenway.
On Sunday, Anthea Barnes made boar’s head pie, one of her bestsellers. It took about three hours from start to finish. To make it, she begins with the tusks, then crafts the head, both from clay. After baking them, she layers on different finishes with sand, and pastels mixed in with plaster. This is followed by a complex sequence of glazes to achieve an almost-burned, crispy look. The finishing flourish is a bright green apple in the boar’s mouth, making the apricot-sized pie look eerily realistic. ‘It was the prize centrepiece’, she tells me, ‘so it has to be perfect.’
Anthea is a food miniaturist, one of several makers specialising in the Tudor era, and the owner of the business Wyrdworldminiatures based at her home in Northampton in the Midlands. She makes contemporary foods too, including cherry cake and banoffee pie, each the size of a bottle cap. She sculpts their life-like waves of icing and cream using fine scalpels and needlepoint tools. Her picnic menu has just been released for summer: glistening olives no bigger than a needle’s eye, elegantly cut ham sandwiches (crusts off), and a mound of potato salad with chives drenched in dressing. None of Anthea’s creations are edible – they exist to be consumed by the eye, not the mouth. And people don’t share her creations with friends or family; they keep them for themselves, arranging and rearranging them in their 1:12 scale dioramas and dolls’ houses.
For her Tudor-inspired miniatures, Anthea gets her recipes from history books, often spending days searching for something new to create. She prefers to begin her process by making life-sized edible versions of the recipes so that she can understand their specific textures and colours. When that’s not possible, as with her more unusual pies, she works from images and historical drawings. Sometimes she goes even further: when developing her swan pie, she spent time photographing the birds and collected their feathers too. When we speak, she’s pleased to have found a recipe she’s never seen miniaturised: a length of intestine stuffed with a pudding of rice, suet, and currants. She learns about Tudor food as she goes: the bright jellies that would have been coloured with crushed beetles or sandalwood, the domes of white sugar that signalled wealth, and stargazy pie, which celebrated fishermen’s catch and is immediately recognisable for the fish heads that peer from its rim. Making Tudor food miniatures connects Anthea to this history, a tactile understanding of an era she adores.
I first met Anthea at the Miniatura expo, a weekend-long gathering of miniatures enthusiasts held on the outskirts of Coventry in March. Here, she was one of more than one hundred exhibitors selling their painstakingly created wares. I arrived at Coventry train station unsure of what to expect, but soon I was among the ‘miniacs’, surrounded by the hubbub of obsession and delight in the hangar-style hall of the conference centre. Attendants had lists of very specific items that they needed to buy for their collections. One woman, who had flown from South Africa to find wine bottles for her 1:12 scale dining room, told me there were very few miniatures for sale in her own country. Another was concerned about buying too much; she’d already had to build a rim of shelving around her ceiling to store her twenty-odd dolls’ houses. Among the many stalls, a vast array of miniature food was on offer: tuppence-sized fried breakfasts, Marmite jars smaller than the tip of your little finger, Lilliputian Yorkshire puddings, and, my favourite, a tiny and perfectly rendered packet of Jacob’s crackers, which I bought. Throughout the day, fellow enthusiasts told me good-naturedly that I’d made a rookie error by bringing my bank card: the old-timers knew to bring cash to limit their spending, willpower no match for so many tiny wonders on display.
Miniatures are likely items on an unlikely scale, an uncanny marriage of familiar yet different. They provoke what In Miniature author Simon Garfield has described as ‘greater scrutiny and a deeper participation’. The shock of their scale makes us pay closer attention to the item they represent, compelling us to marvel at the formerly mundane. Can it be real? we ask ourselves. How is it possible? For those of us who are enthusiasts, it’s a heady mixture of playfulness and awe. I like to handle the miniatures I encounter, to turn them upside down and tease out the riddle of their making, before placing them close to their life-sized sibling: a tiny toaster beside my real one, a minuscule desk above the one at which I write this, a jubilant play of scale all around me.
While food miniatures exist as static objects at fairs and in cherished private collections, the internet has put them in motion. A plethora of tiny cooking shows has turned YouTube into a haven for the culinary miniaturist. US-based channel Tiny Cakes - which make edible miniatures - has accrued 6.32 million subscribers and close to one billion views in only three years. Like its competitors, including the Japanese Miniature Space and Indian Tiny Foodkey, it posts short films of recipes cooked in miniature. Manicured hands use dolls’ house-sized utensils to mix, roll, chop, and fry, culminating in a final shot. The channel’s ‘Best Miniature BURRITO Recipe Ever’ video has 48 million views, and it’s not an outlier – tiny cuisine is big business after all.
These channels have a lot in common with Anthea’s business, in that they rely on the awe of tiny things, on artisanal skill, and perhaps on a degree of obsession too. But she’s adamant that they’re different, and is dissatisfied with the fleetingness of the YouTube creations. ‘It’s the same implements, but that’s it. You can't keep it. It's filmed and it's finished’, she says. Hannah Shepherd, model maker at the long-running family business Shepherd Miniatures, concurs, emphasising the difference between fans of these channels and the miniacs at the expo: ‘The people watching those, they’re not people that are into miniatures. They’re not about to go and buy a load of our products.’
That might be because the YouTube videos tend to be tagged as ASMR, essentially meaning that they soothe the viewer, while tangible food miniatures serve a different purpose. Curiously, most collectors stack their dioramas with all sorts of furniture and possessions, but not with figurines. This is partly because well-made, realistic-looking people are expensive and rare. But it’s not just that. In her book, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Princeton professor Susan Stewart explores how miniature scenes are ‘a stage on which we project’. They are vectors for histories we want to explore, to re-enact, to perfect. Miniatures, then, like toys in general, are ‘a device for fantasy, a point of beginning for narrative’, Stewart writes.
Thus, we need to be able to imagine ourselves within the miniature world for it to become meaningful. Miniature food aids in this purpose by implying habitation: we see the baking arrangement on the tiny table or the minuscule slice of pie and imagine that someone has just stepped out, and that ‘someone’ could be one of us. Anthea now makes pies with a bite taken out of them, as if someone began eating mere moments ago and was called away. They’re selling very well. Likewise, Shepherd Miniatures sells Cadbury’s and Toblerone chocolate bars that are half unwrapped. No kitchen diorama is complete without a partially sliced loaf of bread, and the Jacob’s crackers I love so much are opened and partially spilled, as if a hand hovers nearby.
Food is always entwined with personal memory and meaning, and the world of miniatures seems to be a literal microcosm of this notion. ‘People buy the miniature products from their childhood,’ Hannah Shepherd confirms, ‘they want to imagine themselves using them.’ For her company, which has been running since 1992, it used to be ration-themed foods. Customers recalled their grandparents having them. Now, as generations shift, it’s 1960s and 1970s products: Abbey Crunch biscuits (a precursor to the Hobnob), and Week End Chocolates & Candies, a box of treats marketed as a weekend indulgence.
The miniature space might be a stage for our personal histories, but it serves other narratives too. In 1924, the British royal family unveiled one of the greatest feats of miniaturist skill in the world: Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House. It was conceived by Sir Edwin Lutyens, the architect most known for building the twentieth-century British colonial capital in Delhi. He intended Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House to be a showcase of British skill and design, a miniaturised version of his exportation of imperial principles and power. This grand Edwardian villa includes running water, electricity, and working lifts. Among its more than 1500 miniature objects, there is food. And not just any food: only food brands which supplied the royal household were included. Many are brands we still recognise today – McVitie’s biscuits, Colman’s mustard, Lyons tea, Tiptree jam – and they remain popular items for dolls’ house collectors too.
But the House and its fully stocked pantry were about much more than miniatures. In the early 1920s, the Empire was crumbling, and Britain was struggling with post-war economic decline. Protests against poverty were frequent, dubbed ‘hunger marches’ by the press. The House was a reaction to the imperialists’ strife, an attempt to evoke an aspirational Britain instead of the harsh reality of decline. Millions of visitors viewed the House when it was originally exhibited at the British Empire Exhibition (1924–25) and at subsequent exhibitions, just as millions continue to do so in Windsor Castle where it now sits, protected by strengthened glass, the preservation of a certain kind of Britishness replaying through the generations.
At Miniatura, it was hard not to notice a kind of culinary mono-culture among the stalls and shopping bags. You could buy all sorts of fried breakfasts, loaves of bread, packets of tea, and roast dinners but many of our most eaten foods – pizza, pasta, curry – were in short supply. It seemed that the miniature worlds being created were of a specific kind: insular, nostalgic, white. Worlds that Lutyens and his ilk would probably approve of as being ‘British’, and which bear little resemblance to a reality in which both food and culture are necessarily plural. When I asked people why they were constructing historical scenes, rather than ones representing the present day, they spoke of a seemingly self-evident preference for older times, a whiff of declinism in the air. But the younger generation of food miniaturists is challenging this, not least those manicured YouTube creators. On their channels, an astonishing breadth of cuisine is on offer, a miniature moveable feast if you will: masala fish fry, sushi, tapsilog, hamburgers, tarte tatin, tuwon shinkafa … you name it, it’s probably there, and tiny. The latest issue of Shrunk, a gorgeous magazine targeting the younger generation of miniacs, includes a tutorial by Indian miniaturist Esha Bijutkar for a coin-sized sourdough takeaway pizza, complete with basil leaves and blistering cheese. It’s a mouth-watering rendition, and a far cry from the staid traditionalism of the older miniature fare.
Anthea, too, is exploring contemporary favourites, including her banoffee pie. And Hannah at Shepherd Miniatures has noticed this shift as well. Her 1:12 scale Lindt-style chocolate rabbit, each one not much bigger than a sultana, is hugely popular – I own three myself. Hannah makes them by 3D printing the rabbit shape and then applying gold foil before finishing them with a minuscule width of red silk ribbon, which she ties in a knot. The rabbit was a perfect item to recreate because ‘it’s such an iconic shape’. Her models don’t say Lindt, but you know what they are straight away, and true to the meaning of miniatures, they also come in a half-eaten variant. A couple of weeks before Easter, they’re all anyone wants to buy. Hannah tells me that her customers will change the food in their scenes to match the calendar, and they’ll deliberately buy the real version of the same food too (I’ve met miniaturists who lay out miniature baking tableaux for family birthdays.) It’s Easter, Hannah’s Lindt-style rabbit tells you, with its shining contours and neat red neckerchief.
In Britain today, just as in Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, the miniature becomes a cultural marker, a distillation of the wider moment, and a marketing coup for whichever food gets to define it. The Britain evoked by those tiny Tiptree jars never really existed, at least not outside the rarefied pantries of palaces. Anthea can never truly inhabit Tudor life, no matter how many mini pies she bakes, and a pint-sized Lindt rabbit says more about social media’s reign than the meaning of Easter. And those partially spilled miniature Jacob’s crackers I love so much? They remind me of my mum who ate them often, messily with butter and cheese, and who’s now gone. Through the delirium of scale, these tiny foods become instruments of story creation, whether for a fallen empire or a person trying to reclaim their past. That is the desire of the miniaturist, for better or worse: to construct the world – not as it is or was, but as we wish it had been.
On the last day of the Miniatura expo, I waited for the bus back to Coventry town centre. Another woman was waiting too, and we chatted about our purchases. She’d bought several items, but her pièce de resistance was a decorative plate. She balanced it in the crook of her palm, the size of a penny. It was the spitting image of one her mother had owned, she told me, triumph in her voice. It was only brought out once a year, for the Christmas cake. ‘But my sister got it,’ she said, as we stood at the stop. We nodded at each other, filling in the blanks of bereavement and familial tension. Now, she had one too.
Credits
Emily Kenway is a writer and researcher. Her second book, ‘Who Cares: the hidden crisis of caregiving and how we solve it’ (Hachette 2023) was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. When she’s not collecting miniatures, she is currently completing a PhD at University of Edinburgh.
Photographs today are by Anthea Barnes and Hannah Shepherd.
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Beautifully written and well researched. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. Thank you Emily.
wonderful writing, thank you x