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Menus for the Buffet Luncheon
MANY dining-rooms are too small to have a wedding breakfast served at the table, and for that reason buffet luncheons are most popular.
The dining table is decorated with flowers and often lighted with candles under colored shades, and on it are placed extra supplies of silver and small dishes of olives, nuts and bonbons.
As the guests leave the receiving line, they move informally toward the dining-room, where they stand to be served. If the wedding reception takes place directly after a ceremony in the morning, or at high noon, the refreshments are more elaborate than at an afternoon affair and the guests may be seated to be served in the different rooms.
When a caterer is not employed, and the serving of the refreshments is managed by the hostess herself, it is a pretty and practical [145] plan to ask several young girls to help in the dining-room. They should see that the guests are promptly supplied, and can relieve them of their plates when they have finished.
Below are half a dozen good menus for buffet wedding breakfasts and receptions, varying in degree of formality to suit individual needs. I BOUILLON
This is the page that explains why the rest of the chapter looks as it does. The dining rooms were too small to seat the guests, so the wedding meal became a buffet.
- The menus are not on this pageThe text breaks off at the first line of the first one, the word BOUILLON under a numeral. Six menus are promised and the page delivers a heading; the rest belonged to the pages that followed, so do not go looking for them here.
- A wedding breakfast is not breakfastIt is the meal after the ceremony, whatever the hour, and the page is clear that if the wedding is in the morning or at noon the food is more elaborate than at an afternoon reception. The word records the time weddings used to be held, not the food.
- Standing to be served is the designNo seating, no place cards, no service at table: extra silver and small dishes are set out on the decorated table and the guests move toward it from the receiving line. Everything else on the page follows from that single decision, and it is still the only way to feed a crowd in a house.
- Candle shades are an open flame under paperThey recur all through this book, usually coloured and usually on a crowded table being reached across. Battery candles under the same shades give the colour and the glow without putting a flame under paper among moving sleeves.
- The helpers are given a specific briefSeveral young girls are asked into the dining room with two jobs: see that guests are supplied promptly, and take their plates away when they have finished. Whether you are hiring two people or asking two friends, that is the brief, and it is the part most hosts leave vague.
- Olives, nuts and bonbons stay outSmall dishes of them are placed on the table alongside the extra silver, so that there is something to take at any point in a long reception. It is the ancestor of the grazing table, and it is why the page says to put out extra small dishes.
The first sentence is a candid admission, and it is unusual in a book of this kind: many dining rooms are too small to have a wedding breakfast served at the table, and for that reason buffet luncheons are most popular. The fashion is being driven by the houses, not by taste. The page then divides its readers in a single line, between those who employ a caterer and those where the serving is managed by the hostess herself, and it addresses the second group, telling them to recruit young girls from among the guests and to give them a job. That is the social arrangement this chapter rests on: unpaid help drawn from the family and the guest list, doing in a private house what a hired staff would have done, and a hostess who had to know how to organise them without appearing to.