PITTSBURGH — Barb Yavorcik’s husband jokes that when he called his mother to tell her they were engaged she hung up the phone and turned the oven on to preheat.
Why? “To bake the cookies for the wedding, of course,” she said.
In certain parts of the country, particularly in Pittsburgh and Youngstown, Ohio, where the Yavorcik family came from, if you do not have a cookie table — actually several cookie tables ready to greet your guests as they enter the wedding reception — you may as well expect nothing short of a revolt by the guests.
Or at least life-long judgment and gossip about “that wedding” that had no cookies.
“If you don’t do it, people talk about the wedding that ‘didn’t have the cookie table’ — nobody wants that shame brought to their name,” said Christina Blasi, who had a bountiful cookie table at her Pittsburgh wedding.
“Everyone makes different types of cookies, and once complete, they come together to be a massive assortment of deliciousness. The key to the success of a cookie table is to-go containers. Most people can’t eat a dozen cookies after dinner and cake, but they sure will pack to-go containers full of them to eat for breakfast the next day,” said Blasi.
In short the cookie table is everything; no matter if the wedding is held at a fire hall, social club banquet hall, high-end hotel, or on a beach, and no matter how inconvenient it is — if you are from the Rust Belt you will find a way to bring homemade cookies and display them artfully at your wedding.
For the generations who made up America’s Melting Pot and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren the cookie table is more important than the cake, what is served for dinner, or what kind of dress the bride wore.
It is a tradition whose origin is not entirely clear but involves months of preparation, several hundred pounds of sugar, butter, and flour, a variety of nuts as well as a sense of pride and connection to the past.
Every cookie you make you know you are continuing a custom started by your mother’s, mother’s, mother as a way to showcase your family’s culinary prowess.
Often times you are using their same recipes; some with notes in the cookbook written in their native language, most of them with smudges of butter or molasses in at least one of the corners of the page.
The story goes during the great migration of the 20th century — a massive influx of laborers and their families migrated to Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Michigan for work from Poland, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Greece, and Serbia. When their children got married they were too poor to host elaborate weddings — so they found the only way they knew how to “show off” their family heritage for the wedding: making elaborate cookies.
Hundreds, even thousands of them.
They would enlist their mothers, aunts, sisters, and neighbors; the baking would go on for weeks, with sheets laid out on card tables as dozens of women rolled, kneaded, and decorated; forming an assembly line of dusty flour, gossip, espresso, and eventually wine by the end of each day.
There would be laughter, gossip, some squabbles, and children sneaking in for a taste of sugary dough or icing. Many of them placed their finished confectionaries in their fruit cellars. Not just so they would not spoil, but so that no one was tempted to eat them before the big day.
Today they go into freezers.
The day before the wedding they would enlist every family member and neighbor to help them bring boxes and boxes of cookies, then spend hours artfully displaying them on a series of tables at the reception hall.
The end result was a point of pride on the wedding day; guests were greeted as they walked into the reception with several long tables filled with colorful cookies stacked on trays all waited to be judged first, if only mentally, then eaten.
It is a tradition that is very much alive today with one slight variation; every family provides a to-go box — back then the cookies went home in your gramma’s or mother’s pocketbook wrapped up in a napkin.
The only hard and fast rule: no store-bought or bakery cookies.
……..
- Discussion
-
The cookie table and the bonds of traditions in America https://t.co/5ajtm43RPK by @SalenaZito pic.twitter.com/qfS68vtgsW
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) November 26, 2017
Those cookie tables can be a life saver. My family attended a wedding at some high class hotel where they ran out of food. My Dad didn’t get enough to eat, so he filled up on cookies.
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.