MENUS MODELLED IN KIND OF WAX.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 119, 23 May 1938, Page 12

MENUS MODELLED IN KIND OF WAX.

Three Hundred Bundles Of Sausages On Display. The visitor to the studio flat of Mine. Mary Newberry in Melbourne must tread warily lest he trip over roast fowl or bring down ripe peaches and tomatoes in an avalanche to the floor! Her particular task is to model in a kind of wax any foodstuffs for display, and she has been much complimented on the life-like appearance which she obtains by her patented process. Working out dozens of menus for a section at the exhibition of school children's work, she actually cooked them all. "It is useless to say you can carrv the colours of a baked fowl in your eye," she remarked as she ran her practised finger over the carefully modelled legs tinted to & succulent shade of golden brown. Naturally she is reticent about the process, but it works as well with joints as with custard tarts, and she has just made three hundred bundles of sausages for the window display of a chain °of provision shops. They are so like the originals that even Mme. Newberry has difficulty in saying which is which. Mme. Newberry has had no training tor her extraordinary art. and has never had a lesson in modelling, vet her lobsters, tinted the correct shade, look out with cold and frosty expressions from their beds of imitation lettuce, seemin<* to demand just the addition of a little mayonnaise to make a tempting meal. Mme. Newberry, who was born in England, but spent 25 years in New Zealand, will leave in May for En" land, will tour the Continent, and then to the United States, where she will meet her son, Mr. Reginald Newberry, who is a singer, living in New York! As a lad he toured Australia and was one of the late Dame Nellie Melba's "discoveries." In the United States Mme. Newberry will go to Hollywood, where she hopes to obtain modelling work for film studios. j