's "The Wedding Breakfast", 1862 The name is claimed to have arisen from the fact that in
pre-Reformation times, the wedding service was usually a
Eucharistic
Mass and that the newlyweds would therefore have been
fasting before the wedding in order to be eligible to receive the sacrament of
Holy Communion. After the wedding ceremony was complete, the priest would bless and distribute some wine, cakes, and
sweetmeats, which were then handed round to the company, including the newlyweds. This distribution of food and drink was therefore a literal "break fast" for the newly married couple, 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 19th century however, a pre-16th-century origin seems unlikely. 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. The author of
Party-giving on Every Scale (London, 1880) suggests the phrase may have evolved fifty years earlier: ==Current use==