Pickle, or relish, trays have a place at holiday dinner tables that's as central as the turkey's, in their own way. They are the calling card for the meal to come, and a welcome for your guests. Before the mashed potatoes are passed, before the green beans almondine and stuffing and long before the bird itself, the pickle tray makes the rounds, announcing to taste buds that it's time to eat -- nay, it's time to feast! Offering a veritable cornucopia of tastes and textures, the tray has crunched itself through the years into nostalgic holiday lore.

Google "relish tray" and you'll come up with any number of postings on bulletin boards, with people reminiscing about what their families put on the tray.

On Yahoo, there is even an extensive conversation on tray contents, prompted by someone vexed to have been asked to bring one to a holiday gathering: "What the hell do you put on relish trays?"

		Your tray welcome • Do you have a relish tray or pickle tray tradition? A recipe or idea to share? E-mail Margi Shrum at mshrum@post-gazette.com and we can share some of the responses in our Thanksgiving week section, which runs on Monday.

"You should put on the trey (sic) anything that you think is appropriate and if anyone says anything about it boot them in the old wazoo," was one gnarly response.

Wazoos aside, some tasty morsels were seen only at the holidays in the past. Olives, for example, which could be too expensive for the daily tables of working class families.

Mercy Ingraham, of Hulmeville, Bucks County, is a member of the Past Masters in Early American Domestic Arts and the Historic Foodways Society of the Delaware Valley.

She says pickled and preserved foods of all kinds meant survival in Colonial times, when autumn was devoted to smoking, pickling and drying.

In that era, pickles and relishes were "a seasoning and a flavoring to enhance the very dull winter foods you're eating, which are pretty salty and pretty yucky" and short on nutrition.

There was "nothing green to eat. That's so hard to conceive of in this day. You had nothing green from the killing frost to late March ... all of humanity had nothing to eat but what they preserved," says Ms. Ingraham, who teaches open-hearth cooking.

Formal pickle trays -- what we use or recall as compartmentalized, glass dishes used by our mothers or grandmothers -- were certainly not on the Colonial scene, says Ms. Ingraham.

"[To have glassware] you're looking at people who have disposable incomes, not the average poor Joes out in the field."

Yet by the early 1800s, celery, at least, had exalted status.

Sandra L. Oliver, a food historian and co-author with Kathleen Curtin of "Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving History and Recipes, from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie," published by Plimouth Plantation, says having celery on the table was a social coup in the early 1800s. "It takes fiddling, it's fussy to grow and then have you to blanch it," she says of the attitude toward it.

And so celery vases and celery trays popped on the scene.

"Usually when a dish gets its own serving piece, it's an indication of its status at the table," she says. "In fact, one of the things that the [relish] tray may tell us a little about is that celery slid down the importance ladder a little bit" when it began getting snugged in next to the olives.

Pickles dropped off the table altogether in some quarters. At the turn of the 20th century, when cooking was becoming domestic science, "Pickles were very below stairs. Pickles would not been seen at a fancy dinner," says Laura Shapiro, author of "Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century."

Formal menus, however, often listed items that later would be found on a pickle tray. She quotes a Christmas menu from Fannie Merritt Farmer's "1896 Boston Cooking School Cookbook" that, after consomme and breadsticks, includes a line for olives, celery and salted pecans, although she pointed out that there's no notations on how to serve them.

Asked whether she ran into much about relish trays in researching "Perfection Salad" and her "Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America," Ms. Shapiro says no, but adds, "It's interesting ... I can't believe there's a full-course Thanksgiving menu out there that doesn't have it. I wonder if it isn't said anymore but everyone knows it's kind of out there."

It's at least deep in memory.

"I see it in front of my eyes," says Ms. Shapiro, reminiscing. "It might have been at my grandmother's house, because she had those cut [glass] trays."

Ms. Oliver, of Islesboro, Maine, still has her grandmother's pink Depression glass relish tray, and fond memories of eating from it.

"I loved green stuffed olives!" she says. "I used to suck the pimento out of them."

Her coauthor, Ms. Curtin, preferred the black olives. "She remembers sticking them on her fingers. All the kids would do that.

"I would never have been allowed to get away with that in my house. It was probably bad enough I sucked out the pimento."

Ms. Oliver says in a recent posting on her blog (blog.mainefoodandlifestyle.com/2008/10/the-old-family.html) that she found a patent for a "new style relish tray" in the late 1880s.

Into the next century, the multicompartment trays were common.

"Almost every [glass] company made them," says Leora Leasure, vice president of the Three Rivers Depression Era Glass Society. "Sometimes they were very plain, just a plain clear glass. Other times they'd be highly decorative, with etchings or cuttings.

"Every hostess had to have something like this on their buffet table, let alone the housewife who wanted to have something nice on her table."

Ms. Leasure, who deals in elegant glass -- Depression-era glass that is handworked rather than stamped -- says she owns about a half dozen of the trays.

Kathy Eickholt of Midland, Mich., deals online on eBay and at tias.com in Depression and elegant glass. She has about two dozen pickle trays, ranging from lazy Susan types of ceramic that were popular for outdoor entertaining in the 1950s and '60s, to pretty, petite trays, only abut 5 1/2 inches across.

In decades past, consumers would buy side pieces as complements to their tableware, perhaps matching the relish tray to a goblet pattern, she says.

The variety of dedicated glass tableware could be astounding, way beyond pickle trays, Ms. Eickholt says, describing, as she laughed, a footed mayonnaise server. "You're thinking to yourself, 'How much mayonnaise are you going to eat that you need a separate bowl for the stuff?"

People who buy from her are "somebody who is either trying to recreate something they remember from their childhood, or it's someone who wants to have something a little fancier, a little touch of elegance that sets their table apart from other people's."

And there are just people who like to nosh. And sneak a few olives when no one's looking.

Ms. Leasure says, "Your mother probably had backup [ready] because she knew people were going to do that."

I have my own Thanksgiving relish tray (as I think we called them) memories -- of a cut-glass tray with individual compartments, filled to the brim, even overflowing, with goodies that always included those so unnaturally red spiced apple rings.

We stuffed the platter in the fridge, hoping it would last until dinner. It never did. From the time it was complete, you could hear the fridge door open and shut, open and shut, and cries of "Get OUT of there!"

When the tray got passed at the table, you watched the piles diminish and worried that there weren't as many black olives as you were hoping.

Dang.

Well, Christmas was coming.

And sometimes, you knew, there might be a few olives left behind (they didn't really fit in the tray), in a can in a corner of the fridge.

For later. While you are cleaning up the kitchen.