The Wedding Feast

The wedding feast belongs to every region of India and is cooked on the ground where the marriage is held, in a courtyard, a hall or a tented lawn, by hereditary cooks who travel to the household for the occasion. Its forms follow the region and the community: the vegetarian sadya on the banana leaf of Kerala, the Kashmiri wazwan of the Muslim and Pandit households, the Bengali spread of fish and sweets, the Gujarati and Rajasthani seated thali, and the Punjabi spread of dal, paneer and bread. Each keeps the order of its own table and enlarges it, so that the wedding shows a region's meal at its fullest.

A wedding feast is first an act of provision. The household that gives a daughter or receives a bride is judged by the table it sets, and the number of dishes, the quality of the ghee and the sweetness of the end of the meal are remarked on long after the ceremony. For this reason the cooking is rarely done by the family. In much of India it falls to professional cooks who work in large vessels over open fires, and whose repertoire is passed within the trade from one generation to the next. A meal for several hundred guests is cooked in quantities that no home kitchen allows, and dishes are chosen that hold well in bulk: dals and vegetable preparations, rice dishes, fried breads and sweets that keep their character while waiting to be served. The manner of serving is as particular as the menu. In the south and in Gujarat, guests sit in rows on the floor or at low tables, and servers pass along the line with buckets and ladles, returning to each leaf or plate until the guest declines. The order is fixed by the region: salt, pickle and the dry vegetable come first, then rice with each of the sauced dishes in turn, then the payasam or other sweet, and curd rice last. In the north and in many urban halls the buffet has largely taken the place of the row, with counters for chaat, breads fresh from the tandoor, dal and rice, and a table of sweets. The older seated service survives where families wish to keep the customs of the community. The contents mark the occasion. A feast of the Kerala sadya type is wholly vegetarian and counts its dishes by the score, with a banana leaf laid with its narrow end to the left of the guest. The Bengali wedding meal gives a principal place to fish, to the whole fried or curried rohu Labeo rohita and the prawn malaikari, and ends with mishti doi and sweets of chhena. The Kashmiri wazwan is built on lamb, cooked in many forms by the hereditary cooks called wazas and shared from a large platter, the trami, among four guests. In the Punjab and in the Sindhi and Gujarati households of the diaspora, the feast is a long table of dal, vegetables, a rice dish and bread, finished with halwa or jalebi. Sweets hold a particular place, because the marriage is a beginning and sweetness is its sign. The giving of sweets is part of the betrothal and of the departure of the bride, and the closing dish of the feast, whether the payasam of the south, the gulab jamun of the north or the rasogolla of Bengal, is the one the guest is meant to remember. Sonal Ved, in Tiffin, writes of the regional dishes of India as they are carried from home to table, and the wedding feast is the occasion on which the home cooking of a region is set out on the largest scale and in the form its community recognises as correct.

The feast is built to move from salt and sharp to rich and sweet, and the order of a regional wedding meal follows that line. Pickle, fried papad and a dry vegetable open the palate, rice carries the sauced dishes through the middle, and the sweet and the curd close the meal. Ghee is generous at a wedding, and the spicing of the festive dishes tends to be rounder and richer than that of the daily table.