Food and Drink at the Indian Wedding

Food is an important and integral part of the wedding festivities. The Indian wedding feast can be as varied as the regions and cultures found in India. Traditionally the Indian Hindu wedding feast is vegetarian with no alcohol being served. Some regions even today observe vegetarianism to the extent that no onion and garlic is used in the dishes. Each guest at the wedding would be served individually in the past and sit on the floor to have the food but today buffet style of serving is more common with tables and seating arrangement.
 
The wedding celebrations last for two to seven days and each of these days food is very important. Indian food is known to be spicy and full of flavour, each dish being completely different from the other. The Indian food includes the Indian bread called roti again available in different flavours, rice, dal (a kind of soup made of lentils), a host of vegetarian dishes, curd with different ingredients included in them to make a variety of raitas, sweets and fruit punch. Nowadays you will see that most of the events prior to the wedding culminate with a lavish vegetarian feast, but the wedding reception would cater to the non vegetarian pallet as well. It is also becoming common to serve alcohol for the wedding reception.
 
It is very common to have thousands of people over for the wedding, so you can imagine the amount of food and alcohol that is prepared and consumed. It is also becoming a fashion these days to serve multiple cuisines with live counters at the wedding. You should not be surprised to find Italian food with a variety of pasta, topping and sauce, Japanese food with Teppanyaki and sushi, Chinese, Lebanese and not to forget Indian food. Indian food is available in many varieties you could have Mughlai, Punjabi, Bengali, Gujarati or Hyderabadi just to name a few of the Indian cuisines.
 
You are sure to find soup, a variety of main courses,an extensive salad bar and of course dessert. Soft drinks, juice, tea, coffee and flavoured milk.. The sweet stand should never be missed as you are sure to find something to suit your taste. You have all the exquisite dishes from the other countries as well as the traditional Indian sweets which include the laddu (yellow coloured balls made of chickpea), carrot fudge, gulab jammuns (sweet dumplings in sugar syrup).
 
A table probably you will not find in a western wedding is that of the mouth fresheners. You could find up to 30 varieties of mouth fresheners, which is usually at a table near the exit. You will also find sweet paan which consists of beetle leaf wrapped around the beetle nuts, sugar and spices - a sweet token for the guests who are leaving.

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