Wedding? It’s All About the Cookies — in Pittsburgh

When I’m invited to a reception, I enjoy the desserts. Most often it’s a wedding cake. Sometimes it’s cupcakes. I’ve seen individual wedding cakes (read a recent blog entry about that). The best is a dessert table.

Last month, at Nicole and Paul’s wedding at the beautiful Odyssey Country Club in Tinley Park, they had their “signature chocolate fountain”. I love the fresh fruit — and other items — to dip into the chocolate.

My wife and I sat at a table with the groom’s mother. (Paul had a touching tribute to his father, who has passed away, during the ceremony.) The whole table is from Pittsburgh and they told me what I had read days earlier in the New York Times — wedding receptions in Pittsburgh are all about the HOMEMADE COOKIES.

In Pittsburgh, it's all about the homemade cookies!

For as long as anyone here can remember, wedding receptions in Pittsburgh have featured cookie tables, laden with dozens of homemade old-fashioned offerings like lady locks, pizzelles and buckeyes. For weeks ahead — sometimes months — mothers and aunts and grandmas and in-laws hunker down in the kitchen baking and freezing. Then, on the big day, hungry guests ravage the buffet, piling plates high and packing more in takeout containers so they can have them for breakfast the next day.

I have never seen such a thing in Chicagoland. Sounds good, though, doesn’t it?

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