[Sca-cooks] canned gravy??????

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach karobert at unm.edu:
>my mother did that...so did i in my youth (so to speak).   now life's
>too short. 8)   never been a big celery fan, so most of mine is chopped
>into stew and soup and stuffings where strings don't matter.
>
>was she using them for a relish tray or stuffing them, or doing it for
>the chopped stuff as well?
>
>lots of the weird stuff my mom did i just put down to old world (first
>generation in america) or depression era mentality... do what you can to
>make it usable.

This got me thinking. I realize (or at least have a memory of real or 
imagined events) that when I was a child, my mother would set out a 
platter of celery and carrot sticks at, it seemed, nearly every 
dinner. On holidays it was more elaborate, with olives and little 
pickles and such, but it just struck me that it was, as far as I can 
recall, almost always there. I get the impression that this was 
fairly common in America, as sort of an appetizer (and doubtless on 
my mother's part an attempt to sneak more vegetables into us), but 
not as common now as it used to be.

Do other people have any similar recollections, or is still alive and 
well on a daily basis, just for holidays, or what?

Adamantius