Cooking With Fire in a Field - What Your Marquee Wedding Actually Needs On Site

A marquee in a field is the wedding people picture when they picture a wedding. Long tables, festoon lights, a view, and somewhere in the corner a fire with a whole animal on it. I have cooked at dozens of them and they are, when they work, the best weddings there are.

The reason they work is not luck. It is someone having thought about the boring things in April. So here are the boring things.

The Ground

Grass and fire are a well-known combination, and the answer is not to avoid the fire but to protect the grass. We cook on a raised steel base with a heat shield, so nothing touches the ground and the only mark left behind is a patch of flattened grass that recovers in a week. Tell the landowner this before they say no.

What we do need is flat. A slope of more than a few degrees is a problem for a grill full of embers and a cross with a whole lamb on it. If the field is on a hill, find the flattest spot and let us see it.

And ask about the ground itself. A field that has been grazed is fine. A field that has been ploughed is a nightmare for a van. A field that floods needs a plan.

Distance From the Tent

The fire needs to be far enough from the marquee that the smoke does not fill it and the heat does not worry the marquee company, but close enough that guests can wander over and watch. In practice that is about fifteen metres, and upwind if the site has a prevailing direction. We will work this out on the site visit with the marquee people, and it is worth all three of us being there.

The serving point is a separate question. Long sharing boards carried from the fire to the tables fifteen metres away is exactly what we want. Plated food carried fifty metres in the rain is not.

Access

Our kit arrives in a van and a trailer. We need to get it to within a short walk of the fire site, and we need to get it out again at midnight. Ask yourself, honestly, whether a heavily loaded van can drive across your field in the state it will be in on the day. If there has been a week of rain, the answer changes.

Trackway is the usual fix and the marquee company can often supply it. Better to have it and not need it.

Water and Power

A field has neither, and a wedding needs both.

• Water: We need a supply for hand washing, cleaning and the kitchen. A standpipe within hose reach is ideal. If there is nothing, we bring water in, but we need to know in advance
• Power: The fire needs no power at all, which is one of its great advantages in a field. But the chiller trailer, the lights over the prep tables and the coffee machine do. A generator is the usual answer, shared with the band and the bar, and it needs to be someone's job

Toilets, Bins, and the Unglamorous Rest

Someone has to hire the toilets. Someone has to take the rubbish away. Someone has to sweep the marquee at 1am. In a venue these things are done for you. In a field they are done by whoever agreed to do them. Make the list, put names next to it, and do it before the summer when everyone is too busy.

The best field wedding I ever cooked at had a couple who sent me a hand-drawn map in February with the fire, the tent, the tap, the generator and the van route all marked. By the time we arrived in August there was nothing to decide. That is the whole secret.
- Cai

What the Fire Gives Back

For all the logistics, this is why we do it. A fire in a field at a wedding is the thing guests gather around when the light goes, the thing the photographer cannot stop shooting, and the thing that makes the food taste of the place it was cooked in. No marquee catering kitchen does that.

If you have a field and a date, send me the details and I will come and walk it with you.