Bompas & Parr is launching a range of ‘Meat Jewellery’ at this season’s London Fashion Week. These solid silver skewers can be used to truss quail or to garnish pigs’ heads, but equally as elegant broaches or hair accessories. They will make their debut at Adam Entwisle’s SS11 catwalk show on Monday the 20th September 2010, from 9pm.
The meat jewellery re-introduces a forgotten piece of kitchenalia that can be used to accessorise both meat dishes and dresses. In the early nineteenth century, edible centrepieces were garnished with elaborate skewers called attelets. Chefs threaded whole truffles and blanched coxcombs onto grand dishes such as boar’s heads. Georgian ‘celebrity’ chef Antonin Carême who cooked for George IV, Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I, championed the use of a great number of attelets with his dishes; sadly in the last 200 years, these elegant ornaments have fallen out of favour (photo credits Charlotte Ommedal).
Bompas & Parr is bringing the attelet back. Offered as an accompaniment to an original Bompas & Parr tasting served to Entwisle’s VIPs pre-show, these silver skewers will also be fashioned into accessories, adorning the models coming down the runway. Shaped like arrows, swarods and branded spikes, the designs are inspired by early Victorian forms but made using CAD design, rapid prototyping technology and solid silver. The range is supported by a line of glass eyeballs. These were used by chefs in the past as a finesse piece for presentation animal’s heads at grand banquets.
