A Big Fat Chinese Wedding
24 October 2011
If people thought February was the most romantic month of the year then I would have to disagree. As some of you might know, I attended three weddings last month (you could call it lucky or some would call it a hole in the wallet) but I went to all three without fail, each one was beautiful and different. Yes, that meant three different wedding cakes! – apart from the bride and groom, ‘the wedding cake’ was really important to me :)
Don’t worry if you missed my wedding food ramblings, in this blog post I will show you some of the dishes that I ate. If you haven’t been to a Chinese wedding, they start early, have lots of games and tasks for the boys in the morning, and finish with a traditional Chinese tea Wedding banquet serving a hefty nine course set menu in the evening. I love weddings, they’re events where you gather people you haven’t seen in ages, the atmospehere’s full of love and a wedding is a reflection of the bride and groom as a couple and their guests will delight in getting to know them through all of their little details – including the choice of wedding food!
A Big Fat Chinese Wedding!
Like weddings, the Chinese love to be extravagant with their taste buds too. Hence, in weddings you can see an assortment of food items of every type and taste. But often deciding on a particular menu becomes a big deal to the bride and groom and their family. A Chinese Wedding Banquet is sometimes far more important than the actual wedding itself. It’s a real luxurious and grand event serving guests typically a nine course meal (nine connotes ‘everlasting’ in Chinese) with expensive dishes including shark fin, abalone, lobster, jumbo shrimps, whole steamed sea bass, and sea cucumber are common on a wedding banquet menu.
To illustrate, here was the food menu of what I remember from Jenny and Ming’s banquet (wedding one). It was a Chinese wedding, so we went to a Chinese restaurant called Yi-Ban, Royal Albert in London for dinner. Let me know if you have tried any of these dishes before? By the way, we had 9-10 dishes in total, but I didn’t take a photo of all the dishes (I was far too hungry!) but, this is what you normally eat at a Chinese wedding….make sure you have eaten:
Cold appetizer platter: roast suckling pig with crispy skin this is yum!! and symbolises virginity, served with pickled jellyfish (some might not like this but I love the crunchiness and surprising lightness of this), ham and other cold cuts (some places have the thinly sliced 5-spice beef that’s popular in Shanghai-nese cooking but we didn’t get this).
Course 1: roast suckling pig with crispy skin and jellyfish
A whole steamed fish, chicken, or pig means luck and completeness in Chinese wedding culture. Whole steamed fish symbolising abundance – the fish is never flipped (deriving from old fisherman’s superstition of flipping the fish like flipping a boat – it’s really meaningful isn’t it?) but the waiter will usually can de-bone it for each table when it arrives if requested – but ours didn’t.
Whole steamed fish served with fresh ginger and spring onions
The crispy, whole fried chicken symbolises the female part of the marriage equation, the phoenix (the Chinese mythological bird).
Shark’s fin soup
Shark’s fin (for prosperity) or bird’s nest soup (symbolises youthfulness and long life): both are traditional Chinese delicacies and take hours of preparation so it is usually very flavourful and good nosh!
Braised abalone and mixed vegetables: long leafy greens (pak choi as pictured below), though difficult to manuever with chopsticks, are often served whole to wish long life.
Abalone - one of my favourite dishes – served with Chinese pak choi
Coquilles, sea cucumber, and mixed vegetables – beautiful and light!
Can you see how the artistic arrangement of the thinly sliced cucumber is like the waves in the sea? – beautiful.
Stir-fried lobster: symbolizes the dragon, the essence of the husband; sometimes these are served in pairs (pairs are a good thing to Chinese people)
The stir-fried lobster (usually course 6) symbolises the dragon, the essence of the husband
Fried rice (sometimes it can be bought out as sticky flavoured rice, my fave!) and noodles, often served as a pair – the noodles symbolise long life and eternity.
The fat Chinese wedding served with plateful of noodles and fried rice
Traditionally, after the fifth dish of the dinner, the groom and bride and their families will approach each table to toast the guests. If the groom or the bride cannot drink, it is the best man, bridesmaid, or usher group’s responsibility to drink for them. Very often, the bride will change into a traditional Chinese red wedding dress at that time, if she has been wearing a different style of clothing before.
Red bean soup (red to the Chinese means good luck and my mum tells me there was a meaning to red beans aswell like friendship or something, but she’d forgotten). This is my most favourite sweet dessert soup and I made this at my last Missie Cindz Pudding Club, sometimes this dessert has lotus seeds added to it to ‘wish the blessing of successive sons’ – I’m a big fan of beans and pulses. The red bean soup is served with sweet buns or ‘wife biscuits’ as a symbol of fertility and long life. Sometimes fresh fruit is also served, and is just something that happens after regular Chinese dinners. Guests are welcome to take leftovers home. Taking home the remaining food indicates appreciation of the groom and bride’s choice of food.
Course 9: Chinese red bean sweet dessert
Course 10: wife biscuits and sweet red bean with almond pudding squares
About twenty minutes after the tenth (last) dish is served, the groom and bride, along with their families, will line up at the entrance/exit to bid the guests farewell and thank them for coming. It is not polite to leave before the last dish is served (yes, we had to stay for the full 9-10 course! It’s a hard life :). There are also the requisite pots of tea and bottles and cans of fizzy pop in the middle (7-Up is usually there because the translation of it means ‘happiness’ or something similar). All this talk of food is making me hungry…again!
Let’s eat cake!
Chinese wedding cakes are called “Happiness Cakes”, also known as “Dragon & Phoenix Cakes”
Cake 1: Jenny and Ming's wedding cake
Cake 1: Jenny and Ming's wedding cake, close up shot of tier 1
Cake 2: Barbie and Wai Wah's wedding cake. A traditional classic cake.
Cake 3: Barbie and Wai Wah's traditional Chinese wedding cake
Congratulations Barbie and Wai Wah :) The cake was delicious!
Cake 4: Rachel and Cuong traditional 'English Rose' wedding cake. Beautiful.
The wedding of Jenny and Ming was a semi-traditional Chinese wedding, with the civil service at the Registry Office and Chinese banquet dinner in the afternoon (held at Yi-Ban, London), Barbie and Wai Wah’s special day spread over two days – with the civil service held at Forest of Arden Hotel, Maxstoke Lane, Coventry and the Chinese Wedding banquet held the next day at China Court Restaurant, Birmingham. Cuong and Rachel’s wedding was a fusion of oriental bliss with western traditions – set at a beautiful location, The Pitville Pump Room in Cheltenham. You can pop over to S6 Photography to view some of the amazing pictures of Cuong and Rach’s beautiful day – the venue location was like a fairytale wedding with tasteful (handmade and personal) touches – very inspirational and of course Rach’ looked like a real English princess that day too!
A big thank you to all three newly weds for inviting me to their big day last month. I had a fantastic time, it was great seeing you all and the food, of course was splendid! (after each event, my dress felt snugger than the day before)…see you all very soon.
{photo by Cindy Cheung}
Missie Cindz
