The wedding food phenomenon is a strange one. Walk into any diner in the country and order a dried-out chicken dinner and it will set you back about seven dollars. Order a hundred plates of the same dinner for a plumbers’ convention, and a hotel’s banquet manager might hit you up for an additional dollar or two per serving. (On the other hand, he might knock a couple of bucks off – the banquet biz is a fickle one.) Give the merest hint however, that you might want the same dinner for a wedding, and the price immediately soars to $70 per plate. This sounds like an exaggeration, but unfortunately, $70 is a fairly modest, middle-of-the-road price for a chicken dinner at a wedding reception, where a complex set of factors contribute to make it the most expensive meal of your life.
The language used to describe the food is partially responsible for the cost. Every dish on a caterer’s wedding menu is described in such delicate, sophisticated and romantic (yet at the same time nearly pornographic) terms that it seems only natural that you should pay the cost of a DVD player for the privilege of ordering it.
The odd thing is that most wedding dishes are so insanely elaborate that outside of a wedding situation, nobody would order them. The following are a selection of actual wedding foods taken from caterers’ menus online:
Roast Loin of Venison served with a bitter Chocolate and Raspberry Sauce
Medallions of Monkfish and Mussels cooked in a Tomato, White Wine and Thyme Sauce
Nova Scotia Lobster Salad Tartelette
Chipotle Beef & Goat Cheese Empanada
Baby Shrimp with Celery Root and Fresh Dill in Phyllo Cups
Mango, Cilantro and Cheese Quesadillas
Everything is described in French, though most of these items would probably kill an actual French person. In addition, each menu item is invariably served with something described as “baby” – baby carrots, baby endive, -for all I know, actual babies.
All this makes my personal mission extremely tricky. I’m lobbying to get pigs in blankets served at our wedding reception.
You know – pigs in blankets – little, tiny hotdogs wrapped in biscuit dough, or as I like to call them, Nature’s Most Nearly Perfect Food.
Say what you will about baby venison choplettes or tiny radish quesadillas, when a wedding reception is over, nobody will ever remember the food anyway. They will remember the fact that the deejay stubbornly refused to play any Bobby Vinton, they will remember the surreal color of the bride’s maids’ dresses, they will remember until death and probably beyond that you “snubbed” them in the receiving line, but nobody will ever remember the food.
With one exception – pigs in blankets.
Go to any function where pigs in blankets are actually served, particularly a wedding reception, and you will find ten or fifteen people (well, okay – men) walking around with a towering plateful of them, saying, “Hey! Pigs in blankets! I love these things!”
Just try telling that to a caterer, however.
“Pigs in blankets?” she will ask incredulously, sneering hard enough to bring her upper lip over her eyebrows. “Those are certainly…” - she’ll pick her words carefully – “fun… but perhaps not for a wedding.”
Could she be more snobby?
My fiancee, sensing my determination on this one point has opted not to take sides, leaving it up to me to fight it out with the caterer.
I don’t give up easily. I call the caterer very early one morning, trying to catch her in a moment of weakness. “Hey,” I say, trying to sound casual. “It’s me. I’ve got one more item to add to the menu.”
She responds guardedly. “Yesssss….?”
“Could we get petite couchon lovingly enveloped in embryonic pastry quilts?” I ask.
There is a long silence on the other end of the line for a moment.
“You’re talking about pigs in blankets, aren’t you?” she asks finally.
“Um… well, yes,” I admit. “I oversold it with the ‘lovingly’ thing, didn’t I?”
She laughs and agrees that I did. She tells me to call her if I come up with something less hotdog-oriented. I sigh and hang up.
