A wedding breakfast is a dinner given to the bride, bridegroom and guests at the wedding reception that follows a wedding in the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Scandinavia and some other English-speaking countries. The Compact Oxford Dictionary lists the phrase as only “British”, and the Merriam-Webster online dictionary does not list it at all.
Nowadays the wedding breakfast is not normally a morning meal, so its name is puzzling. The name is claimed to have arisen from the fact that in pre-Reformation times the wedding service was a Mass and the bride and bridegroom would therefore have been fasting before the wedding; after the ceremony the priest would bless and distribute some wine, cakes, and sweetmeats, which were then handed round to the company. Since in the old Catholic custom no-one may take Mass unless they have fasted since daybreak, this was literally a “break fast” for the bride and groom, though others in attendance would not necessarily take communion and therefore would not necessarily have been fasting. Since usage of the phrase cannot be shown to date back earlier than the first half of the nineteenth century however a pre-16th century origin seems unlikely.
The author of Party-giving on Every Scale (London, n.d. ) suggests the phrase may have evolved fifty years earlier:
The orthodox "Wedding Breakfast" might more properly be termed a "Wedding Luncheon," as it assumes the character of that meal to a great extent; in any case it bears little relation to the breakfast of that day, although the title of breakfast is still applied to it, out of compliment to tradition. As recently as fifty years ago luncheon was not a recognized meal, even in the wealthiest families, and the marriage feast was modernized into the wedding breakfast, which appellation this entertainment still bears.
The Oxford English Dictionary does not record any occurrences of the phrase "wedding breakfast" before 1850, but it was used at least as far back as 1838. This would agree with the quotation above, which suggests the phrase came into use about the 1830s.
Famous quotes containing the words wedding and/or breakfast:
“The Ancient Mariner seizes the guest at the wedding feast and will not let go until he has told all his story: the prototype of the bore.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Like plowing, housework makes the ground ready for the germination of family life. The kids will not invite a teacher home if beer cans litter the living room. The family isn’t likely to have breakfast together if somebody didn’t remember to buy eggs, milk, or muffins. Housework maintains an orderly setting in which family life can flourish.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)