That’s the vow, right? That you’ll stay together until one or the other of you dies?

We all know couples who haven’t managed that one. Heck, I’m the second Mrs. Twistie! His first marriage didn’t end with a death, but with divorce. Some of you have talked in comments about previous marriages. Right now, I happen to be doing a lot of hand-holding for a very good friend who decided to call her marriage quits after ten years because she has never been happy in it.

I swore ’til death do us part, and I fully intend to honor that vow. But I completely get that not every relationship is going to work out that way. And so I was intrigued with the fact that Mexico City has a proposal currently on the table for temporary marriages.

The proposed temporary marriage would have a two-year minimum term, at the end of which couples would have the option to either extend the contract or dissolve the marriage without the legal hassles of a divorce. The marriage would simply end.

I’m sure a lot of people will consider this a brand new plot to end the world. But the funny thing is, this sort of temporary marriage has been around for hundreds of years in a variety of cultures. Whether it has value is another question entirely, of course. Just because something has been around a long time doesn’t mean it’s either useful or healthy. Whalebone corsets did little for the health of either women or whales, but they were around for a long, long time.

In Iran, temporary marriage has been practiced for a very long time… but virtually all of the marbles are in the man’s pocket. The woman must be unmarried to enter into the contract, but a man doesn’t have to be. The contract may be broken early, but only if the man decides to do it. If the contract is broken before the temporary marriage is consummated, the woman gets only half the bride price promised… even if the reason is the man’s inability to carry out his end of the bargain.

On the other hand, there has been a version that was beneficial to both partners. In the fifteenth century in the Indonesian Archipelago, women were heavily involved in the thriving business of trading in the ports. Seamen from across the globe came to buy and sell goods in these ports. The men were often lonely and in need of someone to help them understand the cultural requirements of trade – not to mention the language. Local women wanted access to choice foreign goods and no doubt enjoyed the companionship as well. Temporary marriages flourished. When the sailors got back on their ships, the marriages ended with no negative social consequences to the women who had married them. Oh, and any children from these marriages stayed with their mothers.

Temporary marriage was also practiced in Scotland – particularly in the Hebrides where my ancestors hailed from – once upon a time in the form of handfasting. In that tradition, the couple would marry for a year and a day, at the end of which time the husband had the option to make the contract permanent and legitimize any children already born or to send his temporary wife right back to her parents.

So what do I think of all of this? Well, it’s not something I would choose, even if the option was readily available to me. When I make a decision, I usually like to stick with it. I think that depending on how the law is written and how society views it will make a huge difference in whether or not it’s exploitive to women.

But if it’s written carefully so that both partners can gain and neither will hold all the power, then it might well be a viable option for someone who isn’t me.

On the other hand, white was not always assumed.

In Ancient Rome, white was pretty much a given, along with a flame-colored veil. It didn’t matter how old or young the bride was, her social status, or her personal taste. The wedding outfit was pretty much set in stone.

Eventually, though, the Roman Empire fell and things changed. Wealthy women wore the most elaborate gowns they could afford, including the use of the most expensive dyes possible.

The next mention of a white wedding gown comes from 1499 when Anne of Brittaney is reputed to have worn one for her marriage to Louis XII of France.

And again, white for weddings became an option, but by no means an expectation. Mentions of women wearing white for weddings begin to seriously resurface in the eighteenth century.

Hogarth painted The Wedding of Stephen Beckingham in 1729. Note the bride’s white gown and face-baring lace veil.

By 1743, a painting illustrating Samuel Richardson’s popular moral novel Pamela depicted the virtuous heroine wearing white and a demure little lace cap for her wedding.

By the end of the eighteenth century, white had become the single most popular color for fashionable ladies to wear, and thus the most popular color for wedding gowns. Well, at least for the young and (presumably) virginal. Even some royal brides started wearing white, including Napoleon Bonapart’s second wife, Marie Louise of Austria. Her gown for her proxy wedding to the Emperor was white embroidered with gold and silver leaves and Napoleonic bees.

Journal Des Dames et Des Modes showed its first white wedding gown in it’s pages in 1813:
proving that fashionable ladies were wearing white dresses for their weddings.

So what about the common assumption that Queen Victoria is responsible for white for weddings? Actually, white was already being worn by the majority of young, first-time brides who could afford a white dress. The change Victoria’s simple choice started was that the richest of the rich – including the royal – began to wear simpler white gowns with less gold and silver embroidery for their weddings.

And despite that change, the majority of brides did not wear white. In fact, for nearly forty years (1830 – 1870) the most popular color for wedding gowns in the American West was…
plaid, as illustrated by this wedding photograph of Margaret Tidd and her groom Samuel Brodhead in 1849.

Compared to other royal brides of the period, Victoria dressed simply. She kept the jewels to a minimum and had her wedding clothes made of English products, including her lace. In fact, it’s widely believed that she ordered the Honiton lace ensemble of wide skirt flounce, narrow sleeve flounces, veil, and a fichu before she even proposed to Albert. Whether or not that’s true, she certainly did have the lace made in the village of Beer under the direction of one Miss Jane Bidney. It took some two hundred lacemakers to create the set. When the lace was completed, she ordered the patterns destroyed so that it could not be replicated.

But that’s not the end of the story.

You see, Queen Victoria was both a practical and a sentimental woman. She hated waste and she adored her husband. Lace was also a very different beast at the dawn of the Victorian age. Machine manufactured lace was in its infancy – or possibly its early childhood, since the first lacemaking machine was invented in 1809. Most lace was still produced by hand. Handmade lace took a long time to make and was tremendously expensive to buy. Lace would be temporarily attached to clothing and unpicked from the garment when it was wanted for another outfit.

Queen Victoria used nearly any excuse she could come up with to reuse her wedding lace. She wore it every year on her wedding anniversary, a tradition she kept up even after Prince Albert’s death in 1861. She wore it to state occasions. She wore it for official portraits. She even wore it to the weddings of all but one of her children. She did not wear it to Princess Beatrice’s wedding because she had loaned it to the bride.

Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible to get a good look at the lace itself in these pictures, but there’s one where it’s much easier to see. After all, by the time Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee rolled around, photography had gotten pretty darn good.

It’s not a practice one sees much these days, of course. I’ve only ever attended one wedding reception during which the bride changed out of her dress before making her exit. In that case, she put aside her bulky gown in favor of a white leather vest and white spandex leggings… if you couldn’t guess, she was a motorcycle mama and was preparing to ride away on her man’s hog. Good times. But if this vintage tradition appeals to you, why not wear a fun and flirty vintage-look dress from Whirling Turban?

Whirling Turban does have some wedding specific designs, though both of these dresses come from their regular stock. The first is made of hand-woven cotton ikat fabric subtly mixed with metallic silver fibers and a sweeping full skirt wrapped around a narrow pencil type skirt that peeps out when you walk. The second is made of the same unique fabric and features a petal bodice with pink contrast and a flattering wrap-n-tie sarong skirt. I like both… too bad I have no reason to buy either!

But there’s one thing that most likely won’t even enter your thoughts: availability.

We’re spoiled for choice today. If strawberries aren’t in season, we can get them from another hemisphere or an agricultural concern that creates the correct circumstances for strawberries to grow all year round. If we want lemongrass, it doesn’t have to grow nearby. Freezing techniques allow us to have duck, venison, or lamb whatever the time of year. Corn on the cob in December? Not a problem.

Back through the mists of time, though, what you ate depended far more heavily on where you were and what time of year it happened to be. If you wanted oysters but lived inland, you might well be out of luck. If the only fruit trees in the local orchards were apple and peach, then good luck coming up with oranges. Oh, and if you wanted a cake, it took much stronger arms to whisk the ingredients since you wouldn’t have a nice stand mixer to whip the butter and eggs for you. Excuse me for a moment while I go pet my KitchenAid.

I’m back now.

So what might a typical early American bride have served at her wedding feast? I just happen to have run across a couple of examples of what they might have served.

At foodtimeline.org, I discovered this diary entry discussing the wedding feast for a Connecticut couple in 1726:

“A Three-day Wedding Feast
In Stonington, Connecticut, in 1726, Temperance Tealleys was wed to the Reverend William Worthington from Saybrook. Because of the large number of guests expected, a two-day celebration was planned. Elaborate advance preparations commenced for the feast. Chairs, tables, dishes, and utensils were borrowed from the neighbors. Folloing the marriage ceremony…tankards of spiced hard [alcoholic] cider were passed…The main course was family-style and consisted of fish or clam chowder, stewed oysters, roasted pig, venison, duck, potatoes, baked rye bread, Indian cornbread and probably pumpkin casserole. A dessert of Indian pudding studded with dried plums and served with a sauce made from West Indian molasses, butter, and vinegar followed. And they did have coffee. The tablecloths were removed and trays of nutmeats and broken blocks of candy made from maple sugar, butter, and hickory nuts…Outside the front door stood a gigantic punch bowl, hollowed out from a boulder, filled with hard cider combined with West Indian products such as sugar, lemons, and limes…After the dignitaries and most honored guests were served on the first day, and after the bride and groom left on horseback for Saybrook, there was a second day of feasting for the second-rated guests. The third day of feasting was a surprise, for some friendly Mohawks and Pequot Indians appeared…and more chowder and roast pig were served to them. (Information courtesy of the Stonington Historical Society.)”
—The Thirteen Colonies Cookbook, Mary Donovan [Praeger:New York] 1975 (p. 69)

Clearly the bride’s family had some money since the feast includes sugar and citrus fruits had been imported from the West Indies. Of course it also helped that there were busy seaports through most of New England. Had the family been situated more inland, it would have been more difficult and more expensive to try to get those limes. Most of the menu, however, was clearly locally produced. The coastal area meant saltwater seafood, including shellfish. Hickory nuts and maple are common in New England. The region is no surprise looking at this menu.

And can we take a moment to love the bride’s name? Temperance Tealleys! It sounds as though it comes from a Dickens novel. Love it.

Oh, and that cake I was talking about? Here’s a recpie dating from 1747 that really shows us how spoiled we are by modern kitchen equipment and modern standardized recipe writing:

“To Make a Rich Cake
Take four Pound of Flower well dried and sifted, seven Pound of Currants washed and rubb’d, six Pound of the best fresh Butter, two Pound of Jordan Almonds blanched, and beaten with Orange Flower Water and Sack till they are fine, then take four Pound of Eggs, put half the Whites away, three Pound of double refin’d Sugar beaten and sifted, a quarter of an Ounce of Mace, the same of Cloves and Cinnamon, three large Nutmegs, all beaten fine, a little Ginger, half a Pint of Sack, half a Pint of right French Brandy, Sweetmeats to your liking, they must be Orange, Lemon, and Citron. Work your Butter to a Cream with your Hands before any of your Ingredients are in, then put in your Sugar, mix it well together; let your Eggs be well beat, and strain’d thro’ a Sieve, work in your Almonds first, then put in your Eggs, beat them all together till they look white and thick, then put in your Sack and Brandy and Spices, and shake your Flour in by Degrees, and when your Oven is ready, put in your Currants and Sweetmeats as you put it in your hoop; it will take four Hours baking in a quick Oven, you must keep it beaten with your Hand all the while you are mixing of it, and when your Currants are well wash’d and clean’d, let them be kept before the Fire, so that they may go warm into your Cake. This Quantity will bake best in two Hoops.”

My arms are tired just reading that recipe.

To give an idea of just how much locality affected wedding feasts historically, I’ve got another menu for you. This one isn’t from a single wedding, but is a composite of typical foods of the time and place to give an idea of what someone might have served at a wedding in Indiana in roughly 1836.

Cured Ham

Roast Duck

Potatoes and Fresh Peas

Pickled Beets and Eggs

Wilted Lettuce

Rice Pudding

Pound Cake w/ Cherry Sauce

Biscuits

Cornbread

Wedding Cake – Stack Cake

Recipes follow on the site.

As you can see, there’s no maple here and no shellfish. Indeed, there’s no fish at all. If there had been, it would most likely have been a freshwater variety caught at the local lake, pond, or stream. The rye bread of the coastal menu is replaced with cornbread. Instead of limes and lemons imported from the West Indies, there are local cherries and the stack cake is stacked with strawberry jam. Both menus, however, include pork since pigs could be raised nearly anywhere in the country.

The other thing both menus have in common is the sense of celebration, the determination to give the best of what’s available to guests in honor of the event. In that way, wedding feasts haven’t changed one bit.