[Sca-cooks] Raw veggie platter, was canned gravy??????

[Pixel, Goddess and Queen]

This exact vegetable platter was always on the table at big family meals
in my family, as well. Midwestern (also Illinois) for three generations on
Mom's side, then Sweden, Austria, Germany before that. Dad's side is from
central PA (Lewisburg and environs), and I don't remember such a vegetable
platter at big family meals with them.

We usually had another dish of various sorts of pickles, because different
members of the family had pickle requirements, including beets and the
obligatory hard-boiled eggs that went with them. I don't remember this
sort of thing showing up in restaurants either, and we actually ate in
"American" type places sometimes.

Margaret

On Tue, 30 Dec 2003 lilinah at earthlink.net wrote:

> Adamantius asked about a particular kind of raw vegetable platter...
>
> I'm from the Midwest originally. My dad was born there, and his
> mother before him - her family was there before the Civil War (from
> Baltic regions). His father, my grandfather, came from Russia, long
> before it became the Soviet Union (the Ukraine, actually, from
> Poltava)...
>
> My mother was from Pennsylvania, the western part (Aethelmarc?)...
> Born in Copple, grew up in Beaver Falls, ended up in Pittsburgh - her
> family lived in parts east of Illinois, so we never had meals with
> them.
>
> I am familiar with this vegetable platter - the carrot sticks, the
> celery sticks, the rubbery black olives, the icky pimiento stuffed
> green olives (generally called "Spanish olives" - icky because i
> don't like pimientos), radishes (unpeeled), and sometimes some kind
> of cucumber pickle. And, yes, no dips.
>
> I don't recall this as being served in restaurants - although it
> could well have been in some of them, but those brain cells died long
> ago... my experiences would have been in the 1950s. By the 60s, since
> we children were older and my brother could sit still, the family
> generally ate in French restaurants (Italian was only for Thursday
> nights, when the maid had a day off).
>
> This platter was not served at our nuclear family dinners, but did
> appear at larger family get-togethers. And it was often on a special
> dish with separate segments for each item. I never cared for it - it
> was just another kind of blandness to go along with the generally
> bland Midwestern food the family usually ate. BTW, the family was
> strictly urban , except for those of us who lived the hoity-toity
> suburbs. Absolutely, positively not rural.
>
> Anahita