I once dropped a wedding cake at a wedding. It was actually only the middle tier of a wedding cake, but that's a fairly essential tier. The cake had slid all the way to one side of the baker's box, and when I grabbed it, the unexpectedly uneven weight slipped out of my hands, plummeting to the floor of the walk-in refrigerator. My boss at the time was an enormous guy—tall and solidly built, with flame tattoos running up both arms—but at that moment, he dropped to his knees, his head in his hands, wailing, "How? How?" while I stood in shock, staring at the mess. Then I started to sob.
When you work in the wedding catering business, you see a fair number of disasters. Arriving at one farm to begin setting up, my boss and I crested a hill only to see white tent after white tent dotting the field. "It looks like fucking Ringling Brothers down there," my boss said, confused. It turns out that one couple had rented multiple tents for a Friday night event, while another had rented multiple tents for Saturday. Friday night's tents weren't picked up on time, and now we were looking at a field crammed with canvas structures, like an overcrowded flea market.
There was the couple who splurged on roasted oysters, which were cooked and set out at the appointed time; however, the bride was running late, and they sat under the blistering sun for hours.
Or there was the lavish dinner held by a wealthy father of the bride. He had beautiful tables set up on his rolling lawn, only to watch them sink into the muddy ground as they were weighed down with the generous spread. There was the couple who splurged on roasted oysters, which were set out at the appointed time; however, the bride was running late, and they sat under the blistering sun for hours. And then, of course, there were the more run-of-the-mill hiccups: couples that underestimated how much alcohol to buy, leading to angry grumbling, or, at the other end of the spectrum, trashed guests vomiting, truth-telling, spilling, and generally leaving a wake of destruction in their path.
Mishaps happen in food preparation all the time, of course; 30 minutes before a dinner service, I once saw a chef at a restaurant where I worked at drop a mise en place that represented hours of work. No one sobbed; no grown men collapsed to the ground. But wedding food is different. Wedding food is special. Some of the food is pointedly symbolic: Jordan almonds, for example, represent the bitterness and sweetness of life at Italian and Greek weddings, which is why everyone's least favorite candy is now dished out at nuptials across the country. Then there is the more personal significance: a dish that plays into the biographies of the bride and groom, or represents some notable moment in their shared lives. And beyond these factors, the presence of the food itself is also a symbol: of wealth, abundance, of a good life together, of generosity and family and all that aspirational longing that has fueled an industry worth tens of billions of dollars in the U.S. alone.
For all these reasons and more, wedding food has a logic of its own that can steamroll even the best intentions. I've seen it happen to others, and I'm learning this lesson firsthand as I plan my own wedding dinner.
My fiancé is a nearly lifelong vegetarian from the Pacific Northwest, and my family largely hails from the East Coast's tidewater region. That sounded simple enough to meld together. Keep it simple, keep it easy, I reminded myself. Don't go overboard.
Then I started thinking about roasting a whole pig. What a great opportunity to roast a whole pig! How often does a chance like that arise in one's lifetime? And whole pigs, especially of the suckling variety, have a long history at weddings. In China, they are frequently eaten at marriage banquets and are associated with the bride's purity. Throughout European history, they've been seen as a sign of wealth and consumed at such special occasions. I've been indulging in a little marriage-related reading lately, which provides some memorable food-porn feast descriptions. In Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert's chronicle of a frustrated housewife, the wedding ceremony gets barely a mention. But then they go to eat:
It was in the cart shed that the table had been set up. On it there were four roasts of beef, six fricassées of chicken, stewed veal, three legs of mutton, and, in the middle, a nice roast suckling pig, flanked by four andouille sausages flavored with sorrel. At the corners stood the eau-de-vie, in carafes. Sweet cider in bottles pushed its thick foam up around the corks, and every glass had been filled to the brim, beforehand, with wine. Large plates of yellow custard that quivered at the slightest knock to the table displayed, on their smooth surfaces, the initials of the newlyweds drawn in arabesques of nonpareils.
And that's before he moves on to the wedding cake.
When I floated this idea to my fiancé, however, he didn't cotton to the idea quite like I'd hoped. "An entire…dead animal?" he asked me, looking a little forlorn and confused, and maybe a little bit like he was seeing me for the first time. "Like, a corpse?" It was enough to shut that idea down. I had invested more in the idea than in the practicalities of the pig—a rookie mistake—and reminded myself that dear Emma Bovary goes pretty quickly from dining on suckling pig to snacking on arsenic.
That's the trouble with turning food into an abstraction: it is the particulars that make a dinner great or wanting. I saw this over and over again at weddings. People wanted steak because they liked a perfectly done steak, but attempting to recreate the satisfaction of an expertly charred rib eye for 150 people is a fool's errand. People know this—I know they know this—but they cannot stop themselves when it is their turn. That is the unfortunate compromise when you press food into the service of an idea, especially an idea as deeply rooted and personal as love.
And so, I find myself in a situation that reminds me of ill-fated wedding meals past. As is so often the case, what I know to be true and what I'm actually doing are entirely at odds. After tipping so many trays of oysters into the trash at that delayed wedding years ago, I told myself I've never try to serve such a finicky food to a large group. Has that stopped me from adding oysters to my wedding menu? I didn't even blink. See you at the raw bar.
"An entire … dead animal?" he asked me, looking a little forlorn and confused, and maybe a little bit like he was seeing me for the first time. "Like, a corpse?"
At the same time, this disjunct is not that unfortunate. Food is central to a wedding at the same time that it is entirely peripheral. Wedding food is rarely exceptional, and is often far from that. But even if this symbolic, special food tastes terrible, there's a reason people need symbols; Flaubert isn't rhapsodizing about custard because he's hungry. As M.F.K. Fisher noted, "It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others." The time and effort put into planning these meals is worthwhile even if the food itself is a little meh. Some people say I love you with a song; others say it with a sandwich.
That is the promise I am making with every overly complicated hors d'oeuvre and potentially poisonous bivalve I micromanage for our wedding day: I will put in the hours and the effort necessary to give you something you need. I am not perfect—I am barely middling most days, let's be honest—but I will get up early to make you scrambled eggs and you will never want for grain-based salads. This is my solemn vow.
As for the wedding cake I dropped? Turns out, only one side had been really damaged. After pulling myself together, I got fresh fruit and flowers from the owner of the farm. My boss molded the broken bits into something convincingly cake-shaped and smoothed out the icing, then covered the worst bits with berries and blossoms. At the end of the night, the bride and groom thanked us for making it look that much more special, saying it had been a pretty boring cake to begin with (we had not told them of the mishap). Never underestimate the ability of two newlyweds to see things in the best possible light. It is, I imagine, the only way most people make it to "I do" in the first place.
What do you think?