How Wedding Meals Reflect Indian Diversity
The most special wedding meals are those that are close to home, are rooted in rituals, ingredients and customs…
One of my core memories from early childhood is of the sensory saturation that was inseparable from the experience of weddings: the rustle of my silk pavadai sattai (a skirt and top set that is popular attire for young girls in South India), the fragrance of jasmine flowers pinned to my hair, the ceremonial sprinkle of rose water as one entered the wedding hall, and the nervous anticipation of sitting down to eat a yellai saapadu. A veritable feast on a banana leaf, a yellai saapadu (literally ‘food on a leaf’ in Tamil) always followed a sequence: a dot of salt and a smidge of pickle, followed by small helpings of salads, chutneys, curries, and fried appalam, before multiple courses of rice with accompaniments, ending with a few kinds of dessert.
As I remember it, eating a yellai saapadu required focus. Each element was served at warp speed, which meant being decisive about what one wanted. You couldn’t let the rivulets of rasam run on to your paavadai, which required dexterity. You had to know when to stop, because wasting food was frowned upon. The unwavering attention that these feasts demanded also meant that the flavours burned themselves deep into my subconscious. The individual elements were familiar, yet they had been dialled up and refined to befit the occasion. Everything tasted richer and more distinct, such that many decades later I may no longer remember whose wedding I last attended as a child, but I can recall the heft of a coconut-richened sambar and indulgent paal payasam in my mind’s eye.
Wedding meals are intended to leave an impression. Across India, they have been historically viewed as an important signifier of social and cultural capital. In fact, food is also intimately interwoven into the rituals that precede a wedding. For instance, it is customary for the rukhwat, a Marathi pre-wedding ritual hosted by the bride’s family, to include gavhle. In her book Pangat, A Feast: Food and Lore from Marathi Kitchens, cookbook author and culinary consultant Saee Koranne-Khandekar describes gavhle as “a kind of hand-rolled pasta made using wheat flour.” “...several other intricate shapes are crafted in the same fashion, and a set of five pasta shapes is gifted to newlyweds,” she writes.
Similarly, the exchange of both fish and fish-shaped sweets is an important element of prewedding functions among the Bengalis, Odias, and Parsis, all of whom share a cultural reverence for it. In my community of Tamil Brahmins, a pair of conical towers called paruppu thengai koodu, traditionally encasing a sweet filling of rice, fried gram, coconut, and jaggery, are a vital part of seer bakshanam, or sweets and savouries that are offered by the bride’s family to the groom’s family.
Wedding rituals involving food may have developed in response to practical considerations, such as the terroir of the region, the availability of ingredients, and what food was considered worthy of a celebration. On Instagram and in her book 15 Minute Indian, British-Indian chef and cookbook author Anjula Devi Wilson recalls Punjabi weddings in London in the 1970s in poignant detail. She recollects how weddings were always catered at home, usually by her father, a prolific cook. True to Punjabi tradition, the menu invariably featured wheat-based delicacies, including freshly fried samosas, masala matthis, shakkar paras, and rotis.
In contrast, the Himachali dham, a ceremonial feast that is served during weddings and other celebrations, is based on a bedrock of lentils and pulses. A showcase of the produce of this mountainous region, the predominantly vegetarian feast includes seven or eight dishes that feature lentils and pulses, such as madra, a creamy, yoghurt-based chickpea curry, tailey maah or black lentils cooked in mustard oil, and sepu vadi or lentil dumplings in a spinach gravy.
Whereas no South Indian wedding feast would be considered complete without an array of rice-based dishes. Archana Pidathala underscores the almost sacred primacy of rice in Telugu culture in her cookbook Five Morsels of Love. She writes: “Rice is the thread that stitches our existence together from the very beginning till the end — a baby’s first taste of whole food, a holy offering or prasadamu… a wedding feast, a ritual offering for a departed soul, all of these are rice-based.” Befittingly, the success of a wedding meal in South India hinges substantially on how well calibrated the rice dishes are — whether that is puliogare or tamarind rice, chitranna or lemon rice, or a vangi bath with eggplant.
In a country where dialects are said to change every 15 to 20 kilometres, it is only reasonable that wedding food customs also vary widely, even within the same region. The differences are often nuanced, such as the variety of rice preferred for a particular dish. Khandekar explains the staggering diversity in wedding food in Maharashtra, which is a direct result of provenance. “Depending on the region and community one belongs to, Maharashtra offers different combinations of dishes (rice-focused in the coastal belt, wheat-based in the central parts of the state, for instance),” she says. “A Konkani Muslim wedding feast that predates the biryani and kebab culture of today must include a fragrant local short-grain rice and mutton shikori, a rich curry of goat meat cooked with spices and coconut milk for the entire village.”
Some differences are more pointed. “A standard comment that my grandmother makes at wedding feasts in Maharashtra is that the alu cha phatphada, a colocasia leaf and stem stew with peanuts, coconut slices, tamarind, jaggery, et cetera, makes it to the usual suspects on these menus,” says Khandekar. “But in Karnataka, where she was born and brought up, it is usually made for shraaddha [or death anniversaries]. So in our home, we never cook it for a celebration!”
Like kalyana rasam, which is a clarified version of the ubiquitous tomato broth that is customarily served at Tamil weddings, many everyday dishes are fine-tuned to make them wedding-worthy. Deepa Reddy, a cultural anthropologist and blogger who writes about food and culinary-cultural practices on her blog, Paticheri, says that the yellai saapadu is an elaborate version of a typical South Indian meal. “There is an everydayness to the wedding feast in the South,” she told me. The banana leaf offering is a more considered take on dishes (and combinations of dishes) that are eaten at home. “Whereas you might choose to make one dish and not others at home, at a wedding you would do both, because it is part of the hospitality that a wedding would require.”
Cultural diversity also expresses itself by subverting expectations of the sequence of the wedding meal. For instance, Dawoodi Bohra wedding feasts usually start with a sweet dish. A Bohra wedding thaal — a meal served on a large platter, usually eaten communally by a group of people — is first graced with salt, followed by a small portion of sodannu, a sweet rice dish. The meal then intersperses mithaas or a sweet element (such as halwa, ice cream or pudding) with a kharaas or savoury course, such as keema samosas or meat dishes served with naan or roti. The meal concludes with a rich, meat-heavy main course like biryani with a soup and salad on the side. The mithaas is meant to serve as a palate cleanser of sorts, whetting the appetite for the main course.
Similarly, one of the highlights of a Parsi lagan nu bhonu, always served on a banana leaf, is a helping of lagan nu custard — a baked custard made by painstakingly reducing milk over a wood fire. Tanaz Godiwalla, a Parsi caterer who is considered the final word in the business, tells me that the “lagan nu custar” (spelt and pronounced without the d, according to her) is served midway through the meal. “That is the amuse-bouche where you change the taste on your palate,” she says. “Hence, it is served before the [mutton] pulao, but there are people who prefer to have it at the end.”
The choice of fish dish is often the most critical part of a Parsi lagan nu bhonu. “Wars are fought about whether to have saas ni machchi [a unique, sweet and sour dish with a white gravy] or patra ni machchi [pieces of pomfret smothered in green chutney and steamed in banana leaves],” she says. But the love for lagan nu custar is beyond contention. “The custar is predominantly made and served only at weddings, so 90 per cent of guests will eat it,” she says. “Everyone loves custar, even if it is a wee bit.”
In the era of thoughtful weddings, where there is a greater emphasis on cultural authenticity, wedding meals that offer a nod to tradition while being open to modern interpretation are gaining in popularity. Shaariq Akhtar, general manager of the ITC Grand Chola in Chennai, says that these curated wedding meals can take a wide variety of formats. “We have created and mastered many culinary themes over the years,” says Akhtar. “For instance, we receive several requests to do a fun sangeet menu which culminates into an afterparty menu, alongside craft cocktails. The ‘fun’ being referred to is the theatrics and the live making of dishes and smaller plates.” They have also reinterpreted the modern, peninsular Indian menu of their award-winning restaurant, Avartana, into small plates for weddings.
Like Akhtar, Khandekar says she relishes the challenge of understanding different cultures and bringing them together in a wedding menu. As a menu consultant for weddings, she spends time understanding the culinary heritage of the bride and groom before arriving at a meal that represents both sides. When her younger brother, Abhay, got married in 2021, the wedding meal included influences from their Marathi Brahmin heritage, as well as the Tamil Brahmin and Malayali roots of his wife, Swetha. “So the menu included dishes such as inji puli, vendakka kichdi, parippu pradhaman, kaju chi usal, and tondli masale bhaat. In another wedding that I did last year, the groom was Konkani-Marathi and the bride American Bangladeshi. So, their wedding had a fruit sasav as well as alubukhara chatni made of plums. The thrill on the faces of the guests from both sides made all the procurement (this was in a remote location) and effort worth it!”
Even popular wedding caterers like Chennai’s famous Mountbatten Mani Iyer have their response to modern tastes — their watermelon rasam and vegetable payasam are curious novelties in the world of yellai saapadu.
Having grown up in Chennai, I became acquainted with the adage that even if one travelled the world through one’s (wedding) plate, the meal wouldn’t be complete without a small helping of thayir saadam or curd rice. I wondered whether that may just be a truism in today’s scenario of adventurous wedding meals. But I must confess that I was delighted to be proved wrong. “Curd rice is hands down the most featured comfort dish in all our weddings,” said Akhtar. “We have a live counter called ‘The Celebration of Curd Rice’ that has 12 different types of thayir saadam! After all, no meal is complete without it.”
There is something comforting about knowing that no matter how far wedding meals in India may travel, they will always be tethered to home.