The relish tray! A fashion back in the day. I’d forgotten that we even had a HO thread about it: Old Fashioned Relish Tray Foods.
I remember my grandmother had a sectioned pressed glass dish, meant to look like crystal, specifically for that purpose. I remember that dish holding plain celery sticks and those canned black olives, which went mostly ignored before Thanksgiving dinner. (I’m sure the celery and olives were repurposed later because we didn’t waste food.) I was still a wee one when my grandmother stopped including a relish tray on the Thanksgiving table. Nobody in the family was very enthusiastic about it, including her. No other appetizers were served though—everything went into the main event.
The funny thing is that I washed and dusted that relish tray dish for many years afterward as part of deep cleaning my grandmother’s/mother’s china cabinet.
