Chopped fruit cascading down a pedestal. Little lambs painstakingly sculpted out of butter. Table-sprawling mortadella sandwiches .
The trend of putting an artistic spin on our tablescapes (if you can even call them that anymore?) has reached a fever pitch—with inventive, sometimes gravity-defying creations challenging how we entertain and shifting our perception of food as an art form. And one medium that seems to be on the rise lately? Ice. Recently spotted at dinner parties as vessels for candles, or as a clamshell-shaped topper on a seafood tower, or as a ground-level installation for serving chilled canapés, experimental ice formations are being revived in both elegant and surprising ways.
After all, the fleeting beauty of ice lies in its process of transformation. Ice sculpting dates back as far as the 17th century, when Northeastern China’s Heilongjiang people began carving lanterns out of ice and the Inuit communities in Alaska used ice forms to create shelter. As it relates to the culinary arts, ice was first introduced through French chef and restaurateur Auguste Escoffier’s invention of the Peach Melba in around 1892.
At the Savoy Hotel in London, Escoffier would serve his dish of poached peaches, vanilla ice cream, and raspberry sauce in a sculpted ice swan. From there, the ice swan grew in popularity, becoming a mainstay within the fine dining world, while ice vessels evolved into a variety of (sometimes questionable) forms over the years—including its .