Chinese wedding banquets
Posted by Eagranie Yuh on Monday, January 12th, 2009Tags for this Article: chicken, chinese, cookies, fish, lobster, wedding
Last weekend, I went to a Chinese wedding banquet. If you’ve never been, you should try to wrangle yourself an invitation to eat the twelve-course meal. You read right, it’s a twelve-course meal.
We had:
- Appetizer platter with jellyfish, cured salmon, roast beef, and roasted suckling pig
- Sea cucumber, chicken and scallops with mushrooms
- Deep-fried shrimp meat on a crab claw
- Shark’s fin soup
- Lobster with ginger and green onion
- Sliced abalone with Chinese vegetable and bok choy
- Crispy skin chicken
- Steamed whole fish
- Fried rice
- E-fu noodles with abalone sauce
- Almond cookies (see above) and coconut jelly with red bean
- Red bean soup
Needless to say, everyone was very full by the end of it.
This is a pretty standard wedding banquet menu. There are certain dishes that show up without fail (the chicken, fish, rice, and noodles), while the rest of it varies depending on how much you want to spend. A lot of the food is symbolic. For example, the walnuts on top of the almond cookies are supposed to make you smart. This is because walnuts look like brains. Ergo, walnuts make you smart. Who knew?
Posted on January 13th, 2009
Nancy Wu says:
I’ve been to so many of these unfortunately I’m a little unfazed. I just call it dinner at a chinese restaurant. ;) Many outstanding chinese restaurants in Vancouver where chefs are headhunted from China, Taiwan or Hong Kong.
Posted on January 13th, 2009
Eagranie says:
There was a stint when I was also unfazed by the 12-course banquet, but I’m out of practice. I was starting to get full by the fourth course, but managed to soldier through the whole thing.