Getting Ready for a Wedding: The Bridal Tea

Martha Stewart's early 1980s book Hors D'Oeuvres was the inspiration for my daughter's wedding shower, which we did as a high tea. Her book has a gorgeous chapter titled "Tea Party in the Library."

I wanted my daughter's wedding shower to be a delicious and relaxing afternoon for her bridal attendants, her friends, and the several of my old friends who had seen her grow up. We settled on the idea of having high tea, a celebration we had done together as mother and daughter several times in the past, including the Mother and Daughter Tea for her high school. The menu consisted of two courses: a savory course of tea sandwiches, stuffed cherry tomatoes, and quiche (provided by a friend who makes the best), and sweets, the traditional scones with clotted cream, raspberry and apricot thumbprint cookies, and trifle. Four generations of well wishers and family were on hand for the lovely event.

The menu was:

Mimosa punch

Variety of teas
Savories
Cucumber sandwiches on white bread
Curried chicken tea sandwiches on pumpernickel bread
Strawberry walnut tea sandwiches on cinnamon raisin bread
Cherry tomatoes stuffed with salmon mousse
Cheese quiche
Sweets
Tea with lemon, cream, and sanded sugar
Thumbprint cookies with apricot and strawberry jam
Scones with clotted cream and raspberry jam
Mocha chocolate torte

I am happy to share recipes. Please ask.

Getting Ready for a Wedding: Mass Production

We made 150 heart-shaped cookies using sanding sugar and dragees, with a purple and lavendar theme to reflect the wedding colors

One of the first decisions we made about the wedding was to prepare the food ourselves. The task consisted largely of assembling the ingredients and all of the serving dishes and implements: We were completely confident of the recipes, which were all tried and true family favorites.

The menu we decided on was:

Appetizers

Assorted cheeses with fruit & crackers

Garlic rusk with goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes
Miniature chicken kabobs

Baked brie en croute

Pesto dip with cherry tomatoes

Melon wrapped in prosciutto

Mixed nuts

Cheese straws

Main Course

Antipasto selection

Artichoke & caper lasagna with white sauce

Sausage and pepper lasagna with red sauce

Rosemary foccaccio with olive oil dipping sauce

Bread sticks

Home made rolls and butter

White wine

Red wine

Sweets course

Mexican wedding cookies

Iced butter cookies

Truffles & other chocolates

Dessert

Wedding cake

This was an ambitious project, as we were counting on 150 guests, but there was no way to serve a full meal with some elegant touches within our budget unless we took on the basic cooking ourselves. Over all, it took eight weekends for the preparation of 17 pans of lasagna, 400 cookies, and 600 cheese straws, all of which were safely tucked into the basement freezer, and the freezer of a used refrigerator we purchased and stashed in the garage, by mid-summer. All went extremely well--until the power went out for three days! (But that's another story, involving our friend Corky's generator and round-the-clock trips to the back yard to keep in going.)

All of our frozen foods were well received at the reception. I think it's fair to pronounce our recipes top-notch for advanced preparation and freezing. I would be happy to share any or all.

Plating the food and serving the guests were both separate tasks--requiring just as much preparation as the cooking, and also great adventures.

My Daughter's House

The upstairs hall decorated for Christmas

This vintage dressing table was the wedding gift from the groom to the bride.

A great pecan tree in the back yard showers down nature's bounty.

Its been two months since my daughter was married, and my husband and I finally had the chance to visit the new nest she has been feathering with her husband in a little town about three hours distant from our house. This was a wonderful trip for us: We were warmly welcomed by the newlyweds, enjoyed a home-cooked meal with them and our new in-laws, and were generally treated as honored guests. I am happy and gratified to say that the torch has been passed! My dearest daughter is now a homemaker herself. What more could a mother ask?

Getting Ready for a Wedding (Continued)

A stunning depiction of the Wedding Feast at Cana by the Flemish master Gerard David (1500). Even this lavish representation of Christ's first public miracle, however, pales in comparison to Jesus’s description of the event in Anne Rice's The Road to Cana.

I was so fortunate to be reading Anne Rice’s new book, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, right in the middle of the preparations for my daughter's October 2008 wedding. More than once, it provided me with a much-needed reminder of what weddings are actually all about, and why human beings in all cultures put aside daily chores and cares to sing, dance, eat and drink with brides and grooms and their families. At the altar, the bride and groom face one another and pledge to be united “until death us do part.” They enter the marital embrace, (which in Christian cultures symbolizes the love of Christ for his Church, and in all human cultures has been invested with religious overtones), and become one flesh. The marital embrace is a physical testimony of the love of God for each human being, and each individual act of marital love is a transcendental act, invested with the capability to forever change all of human history with the creation of a new human soul—a child. Our culture spends the time and care on no other celebration that it does on weddings (which can rightly absorb the attention of an entire family for months), and this is as it should be. For all who participate and attend, and above all for the bride and groom, the wedding reminds us that God (whose love made Him a Creator), has poured His love into man and woman to make them co-creators with Him. At every wedding, we celebrate the mystery of the divine creative capacity hidden within each man and woman. Why was Road to Cana such a delight during our wedding planning months? It taught me that God loves weddings! A lovely detail of the plot is that the young Jesus (who tells the story in the first person) instructs his family to use his long-hidden birthday gifts from the Magi to finance the wedding of a local girl abandoned by her father. This girl is no stranger or mere neighbor to him: She is the woman He loves and would have chosen as His wife if the Father’s call had been to marriage rather than Calvary. Rice’s description of the wedding brought tears to my eyes:

Under the high ceilings of the house, the music exploded… Huge tables had been set throughout all the main rooms. Through the open doorways, we saw great tents spanning the soft grass, and carpets spread everywhere, and table at which everyone might gather, either on couches or right on the rugs, whichever they desired. Amid all, the candelabra burned with hundreds upon hundreds of tiny flames… Great platters of food appeared, steam rising from the roasted lamb, the glistening fruit, the hot spiced cakes and honey cakes, the piles of raisons and dates and nuts…. The music and the aromas of the rich platters melded and it seemed for a moment to me that—as I stood in the courtyard, in the very middle of it, staring from one feasting group to another…--I was in a great unbroken universe of pure happiness which no evil could ever approach.

In this setting, Jesus performs his first public miracle, and makes a gift of water turned to wine to the celebrating couple. The dancing, eating, drinking, and celebrating go on!

So, God loves weddings. When you are fussing over buttons on bustles, finding the perfect petit fours, and just the right bottle of bubbly for the toast, you are actually creating a Feast of Love that brings happiness to many, and above all, the Father of Love.

Getting Ready for a Wedding

The happy couple with a groomsman and maid of honor

We just had a wedding (our daughter's) at our house--literally, under a tent on the side lawn--and I hope to be writing more about this wonderful event in the future. At this point, I don't have time to write as much as I would like, as we are now getting ready for a second wedding (our son's), though the season and the couple's preferences have sited this happy event at an old mansion in West Virginia. But I feel compelled to offer a bit of advice to mothers and brides-to-be, just in case there are readers facing wedding preps who find their ways to this blog. That advice is: There is no such thing as over-planning for a wedding. Trust me: weddings require an attention to detail unsurpassed by any other celebratory event in human history; whether small, medium, large, or grandiose, they require the proverbial cast of thousands (well, literally, hundreds or dozens) of behind-the scenes helpers and heros to carry out, and everything takes more time and costs more money than you are likely to anticipate. Hosting a wedding for 100 people is not the equivalent of giving a buffet dinner for the same crowd. A special note to mothers of brides-to-be: Do not let anyone--be it your dear spouse, a nervous bride, a kindly aunt, a concerned friend--tell you that you are overdoing the lists, research, index cards, and other planning. You will likely become fixated on fabric, flowers, pew ribbons, cake fillings, and ceremony formats: Relax and enjoy the fact that you can think about little else.

Finally, there are hundreds of wedding books and Web sites out there. They do not all agree, even on some of the etiquette fundamentals. I highly recommended starting with two: Weddings by Martha Stewart, the first of her books on weddings, which has lovely essays and gives you lots of ideas of how to go over the top if you have the financial means to do so, and Bride's Book of Etiquette, by the editors of Brides magazine. The second title has a good table of contents, a helpful index, and doesn't omit any of the crucial etiquette topics that you will have to deal with.

Happy wedding planning! It's great fun!

Imaginary Friends

These little girls are dancing on a piece of fabric I stumbled upon recently while surfing the Internet. Miraculously, this happens to be an exact rendering of me and my sister frolicking with our two imaginary friends, Kikki and Debbie. Kikki and Debbie entered our lives around 1951, and stayed with us until into the 1960s. They shared our bedroom, and, when we begged convincingly enough, were allowed to have their own place settings at the table in the downstairs kitchen. If you don't believe they existed, you can ask our younger brother, who banged his spoon on his high chair tray and laughed uproariously every time they visited.

Genghis Khan Again on Film

The young Genghis Kahn on the Mongolian steppe

I recently watched and greatly enjoyed the first in a planned trilogy by Russian movie director Sergei Bodrov on the life of the early 13th century warrior and conqueror Genghis Khan. Bodrov’s movie, simply titled Mongol, is the fourth major modern attempt to capture the life of Genghis Kahn on film—the first being a 1956 The Conqueror starring John Wayne and Susan Hayward, the second, a Hollywood style epic filmed in 1965 with Omar Sharif and Stephen Boyd, and the third the Japanese-language To the Ends of the Earth and Sea (2007), which I am eagerly awaiting from Netflix. Hollywood’s productions were filmed in English; the 1956 version was made in Hollywood, but producers trekked to Yugoslavia with cameras for the Sharif blockbuster.

Mongol is the first production to be filmed in the Mongolian language and principally in Mongolia. It is a cinematographically beautiful film, with captivating costumes, jewelry, and music. Battle scenes are bloody, but unexaggerated. Modern moviegoers have been well-prepared by the film industry for mass slaughter (even in such youngster-oriented films as the Tolkein trilogy), and there is nothing particularly new here. Perhaps the second and third installments will educate viewers on the astounding military capabilities of the Mongol horseman, who could string and repeatedly fire his bow at an enemy advancing to his rear, while keeping his horse at full gallop. Genghis Kahn’s genius as a military commander is an aspect of his life that also waits to be more fully depicted in coming films.

What is so fascinating to film makers (and viewers like myself, I must admit) about an oriental warrior unequalled in his depredations against military opponents and civilian populations alike? A quick look at the historical sources reveals that Genghis Kahn created the largest contiguous empire in human history, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to Adriatic Sea by the time of his death in 1127. He created the Uighin script, the basis of the written Mongolian language, a system of law (the Yassa) affirming the existence of a single Creator, and established religious tolerance throughout his empire. Historian David Morgan notes that, in bringing the Mongols under his leadership, he transformed the society of the western steppe from that of a tribal system to a relatively more advanced feudal system. Bodrov’s film hints that his charisma was based on his elevation of the principle of meritocracy over that of clan/tribe affiliation, and an attitude of fairness toward his men, particularly in matters of discipline and distribution of booty. These tendencies may be considered to be the kernels of truth embedded in his system of rule, and intersection points, however weak, with the western Christian culture that suffered so grievously under the swords of his horsemen.