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A Field Flower Wedding
NOTHER country bride used the field flowers for decorating.
Big jars of daisies, buttercups, wild carrot, red clover, and tasseled grasses stood in the corners of all the rooms and filled the empty fireplace.
Four little girls, dressed in white with yellow sashes and hair fillets, carried a daisy chain to form an aisle for the bride and her attendants, and the ceremony took place under a big bell of field daisies.
The bridesmaids wore pale yellow georgette gowns, and carried bouquets of black-eyed Susans, the maid of honor wore old-gold georgette, lightened with white, and carried a loose bunch of daisies and buttercups.
In the center of the dining table a highhandled white-enameled basket held a natural arrangement of sweet white clovers, grasses, and yellow buttercups, and was linked by [152] several streamers of yellow baby ribbon, with four smaller white baskets at the corners which held smaller bouquets of the same flowers. A fluffy yellow bow was tied to the handle of each basket.
The menu was also yellow and white and consisted of hot bouillon, sprinkled with grated hard-boiled egg yolks; chicken jelly salad with mayonnaise; tiny bread and butter sandwiches; frozen custard in ice cups trimmed with white paper petals, so that each individual serving looked like a daisy; small squares of sponge cake, and angel food iced in yellow; yellow and white candies.
The boxes of wedding cake were piled on the hall table, and each one had a wee daisy blossom tied into the knot of white ribbon on top. [153]
A whole wedding assembled from things growing in a field, including the food. The menu is chosen for colour rather than for taste, and once you see that, every item on it makes sense.
- The menu is a colour, not a cuisineBouillon dusted with grated hard-boiled yolk, chicken jelly salad with mayonnaise, frozen custard, sponge cake, angel food iced in yellow, yellow and white candies. Every item was selected to be yellow or white, which is why the bouillon needed the yolk sprinkled on it.
- Chicken jelly salad is a terrineCooked chicken set in a savoury jelly and served cold with mayonnaise. It is the most dated line on the page, and it is also the practical one: it had to be made the day before, which is how a household fed a crowd without a caterer.
- The daisy trick is the thing to stealFrozen custard served in cups whose rims were trimmed with white paper petals, so that each portion read as a daisy. The book does not say what the cups were made of, and it does not matter; the idea is that the container finishes the decoration, and it works with anything cold and pale.
- Wild carrot has dangerous neighboursIt is the tall white umbel also called Queen Anne’s lace, and it grows among plants that are not safe to handle or to eat. Hemlock looks very like it, and giant hogweed sap burns skin that is then exposed to sunlight. Gathering it is not the innocent errand the page implies.
- Field flowers will not last the dayDaisies, buttercups, clover and grasses were picked that morning and were expected to look fresh for a few hours only. Cut them late, keep them in deep cold water out of the sun, and accept that they are a decoration for one afternoon.
- Boxes of cake to take homeThe pile on the hall table, each box finished with a daisy in the ribbon, was the parting gift. A modern guest will not know what the table is for unless you tell them, and the practice is worth reviving mainly because it solves the problem of too much cake.
This is one of a run of case studies in the book, each describing a wedding somebody actually gave, and its interest is economic. Every element of this one is free: the flowers are field flowers, the aisle is made by four children holding a daisy chain, the bell over the couple is daisies, the food is bouillon, cold chicken, custard and sponge cake. The only expenditure is on fabric, ribbon and the hire of nothing at all. What the page is quietly teaching is how to hold a formal occasion with the resources of a farm in June, and how to make the absence of money look like a decision about taste. The four little girls with the daisy chain are the clearest example: they replace an architectural aisle, a carpet and a florist, and the page presents them as the better option.