Is there anything more joyful than seeing a newly married couple triumphantly emerging from their wedding ceremony? How should you celebrate that? Wish them well? Throw confetti? Or perhaps you’d prefer to pelt them with lumps of cabbage? Our ancestors certainly had some brutal ways of showing their happiness for newly weds, if the written accounts preserved in the Irish Schools’ Collection are anything to go by.
The folklore collection, gathered by schoolchildren in the 1930s, contains several accounts of things being deliberately thrown at newly-married couples. Cakes of oaten bread were frequently broken over their heads. Today’s brides will be relieved that this tradition is no more and they won’t have to extricate breadcrumbs from their carefully-coiffed confections of curls.
Other missiles being thrown at the heads of happy couples included turnips, sods of turf, old shoes, and slippers. But it seems that the most common missile of all was the humble cabbage. One account from Enniscorthy mentioned how heaps of cabbage stumps would be piled at the chapel door to pelt the “weddiners” as they came out.
Frank Hopkins’s book – Ireland’s Hidden Histories – includes two newspaper reports from the archives which show the entirely expected consequences of hurling cabbage stalks at people’s heads. In 1751, the Munster News reported that a farmer who was carrying his bride home from a priest’s house in Balyna, Co Kildare was pelted with so many cabbage stalks that his skull was fractured and he died the following day.
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And in January 1824, a young bride and groom emerged from the Catholic church in New Ross to find a large crowd had assembled. The woman had married an English sailor, which may or may not be pertinent to the events that followed. The priest dispersed the crowd and the bride and groom decided to return to the bride’s lodgings separately. The unfortunate bride was followed by a 500-strong mob and was pelted with cabbage stalks and other missiles. When the local magistrate sought a reason for the attack, the only excuse offered was that it was an old tradition in New Ross.
Cabbage features prominently in Irish superstitions, perhaps because our ancestors didn’t have too many other vegetables to choose from. Pelting newly weds with aubergines or courgettes was merely an aspiration in the 1800s so they focused on the vegetables they actually had. One such tradition involved picking a cabbage and using it to reveal the physique of your future spouse. The reliability of this technique is questionable. If everyone plucked heads of white cabbage, where were all the short, round-bellied spouses going to come from? To avoid this supply chain challenge, they relied on the shape of the stalk to determine the physique of the future spouse. And if there was plenty of soil on the stalk, it meant the future spouse would be wealthy. This custom was said to be most effective when carried out at midnight on Halloween night, preferably with your eyes closed. Too late now, but put it in the diary for next year if you have access to a cabbage garden and are curious about the shape of spouses to come.
We never plucked cabbage for fun when we were young but we ate so much of it that I presumed any green vegetable was just another form of cabbage. The veil of ignorance was lifted from my eyes when I was nine. I still had not been exposed to a Brussels sprout when I had an impromptu stay in hospital. A scatter of Brussels sprouts accompanied my dinner one day. I marvelled at them for some time and carefully dissected one in a bid to discover how the hospital had managed to roll cabbage into such neat little balls.
Another person who must have been reared on cabbage was James Joyce, if his writing is anything to go by. He seldom passed up a chance to reference the leafy vegetable. Whether it was curly cabbage, greasy cabbage or gaseous cabbage, all forms of the Brassica plant found their way into his books. He even had a hallucinatory cabbage thrown in Leopold Bloom’s direction during the Circe episode.
Which brings us back to the newly weds. While they may not have been thrilled to have been pelted with green vegetables, it seems that today’s brides and grooms are now embracing the cabbage family. In the US, couples looking for a rustic twist to their autumn weddings have been adding flowering cabbage and kale to their bouquets and flower arrangements.
What next, you may ask? A centrepiece of broccoli at the wedding reception? A head of cauliflower dangling from every church pew? Now that would be a turnip for the books.
