The table was laid under the cart-shed. On it were four sirloins, six chicken fricassees, stewed veal, three legs of mutton, and in the middle a fine roast suckling pig, flanked by four chitterlings with sorrel. At the corners were decanters of brandy. Sweet bottled-cider frothed round the corks, and all the glasses had been filled to the brim with wine beforehand.
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert (translated by Eleanor Marx-Aveling)
It is possible that I will always associate summer days in England with weddings. In my late twenties, in addition to the inevitable period of life that brings successive wedding invitations, I began to cater them too. With my great friend and catering partner Liv, I have built kitchens in fields, garages, church halls, and gardens. But, as with so many firsts (a first snog at a year-nine dance, as ‘Oh Mickey’ played; my first night in England, jetlagged and emotional in a friend’s spare room in Mile End), it is the first wedding that has remained memorable and distinct.
I made so many dreadfully naïve decisions, planning a near-impossible menu, assuming I knew how long it would take to peel twenty kilograms of potatoes, pod piles of broad beans, and fill hundreds of rice-paper rolls with julienned vegetables. The day itself was a comedy of errors: a team of wasp-stung kitchen staff, temperatures over thirty-five degrees in the catering tent and canisters of water that had to be refilled from a tap hundreds of metres away through animal paddocks and swinging gates. As the guests took to the dance floor, we collapsed in near-hysterical laughter.
Years on, it’s the story we tell when we’re all together. Because, alongside the anecdotes, we created a meal for over two hundred people that day, including a whole roasted pig. Serving it felt like the realization of the many dreams I had had about feasts in literature. There is something inescapably medieval about cooking a large animal whole; it is a feat so few of us will ever have cause to strive for. It puts me in mind of Henry VIII in Wolf Hall, of the roasted pig in Homer’s The Odyssey, of Shakespeare’s feasts, of Madame Bovary’s extravagant wedding breakfast and of the enormous dining room in William Goldman’s The Princess Bride.