Nostalgia Cooked
September 9th, 2026
No. 12

“Hands, please”

The relish tray that greeted diners before they even ordered and somehow lasted all the way to a Clinton White House Thanksgiving before disappearing; the humble kitchen task, three parsley leaves at a time, that decides who becomes a chef and who doesn't; and three things worth your time this week, including a dill pickle soup built for people who love pickles a little too much.

Coffee, then read on.

- Chef Tim

Do you think that Massimo Bottura has made American pancakes or Thomas Keller has made Xiao Long Bao better than the grandma on mainland China? 

When you first walk into a serious kitchen, you want to know everything. You want to butcher the fish, make the pasta, work the grill, create dishes and understand every technique happening around you. That curiosity is important, but trying to learn everything at once can be the quickest way to become good at nothing.

Learning how to cook is about repetition, passion, care and intensity. It also requires a sacrifice of time and energy, and sometimes the willingness to put aside everything you want to learn so you can focus on the one thing in front of you.

Your first task will be something like, "Please pick 425 each parsley pluches (Sprigs), each with 3 stems and leaves on it."

If the chef trusts you with picking herbs, take it seriously. Learn which leaves are good and which ones aren't. Learn how quickly you can do it without bruising them. Learn how they are washed, dried and stored. Get good enough that nobody has to check your work.

The same thing applies when someone hands you 200 oranges and tells you to remove every sticker. How quickly can you get it done correctly? When the floor needs sweeping, are you the person who notices before the chef does? When someone has been making pasta for twenty years, are you willing to come in early just to stand next to them and learn?

None of these things sound like becoming a chef but I think they have almost everything to do with it.

Eventually those small responsibilities become bigger ones. Herbs become vegetables. Vegetables become a station. A station becomes responsibility for other cooks. The opportunities grow because you have shown that the opportunity already given to you matters.

There are ordinary Thursdays in this business when suddenly someone doesn't show up, a station goes down or the chef looks across the kitchen and asks if you can handle something you've never been asked to do before. That might be the opportunity you've been waiting months for, and you don't get to decide when it arrives. The best way I know to be ready is to approach every day with the same passion and drive, not because someone told you the task was important, but because getting better at it is important to you.

If picking herbs feels beneath you, if cleaning a trash can isn't worth doing correctly, if labeling something properly only matters when the chef is watching, then I would think seriously about why you want to become a chef in the first place.

My advice: the best way to earn the next opportunity is to excel at the one you've already been given.

Before service, the whole crew huddles up and someone tells the story behind the food. Pull up a crate, you’re on the line tonight.

There was a time when you sat down at an American restaurant and something was already waiting for you. Celery, radishes, carrots, olives and pickles arrived at the table before anyone had decided what to order. It was the relish tray, and for much of the twentieth century it was a familiar part of eating out.

I had never really thought about the relish tray until I asked my mom about it. Her version from the 1960s was incredibly specific. Down to the serving dish that needed to be used. Cottage cheese, green olives stuffed with pimentos and Fanning’s bread and butter pickles. That was what she remembered, and more than sixty years later she could still tell me exactly what belonged on the tray.

The relish tray goes back much further than my mom’s version. In the nineteenth century, celery is actually considered a luxury. Growing the pale, tender stalks people wanted required farmers to mound dirt around the plant to keep sunlight out and prevent bitterness. Americans prized it enough that special celery vases were made for the dinner table, with whole stalks standing upright like a bouquet of flowers.

As fresh vegetables became easier to move around the country, the assortment grew. Celery was joined by radishes, carrots, olives and pickles. By 1905, a Fourth of July dinner menu from New York’s Colonial Hotel begins with soup accompanied by olives, celery and pickles, an assortment we would recognize as a relish tray.

Eventually restaurants make the tray their own. In Los Angeles, complimentary relish trays become a fixture through much of the twentieth century. Wisconsin supper clubs turn them into part of the experience. Crinkle-cut carrots and radish roses might share the tray with pickled peppers, beets, herring, crackers and cheddar spread.

One of the last documented appearances of a classic relish tray on a presidential Thanksgiving menu comes from Bill Clinton. The Clintons had been eating them long before arriving at the White House. In 1996, while spending Thanksgiving at Camp David, the presidential menu still included a relish tray with pickles, celery, tomatoes, green onions, olives and carrots. By then, the relish tray was already disappearing from American tables, which makes its presence there feel almost like the end of an era. A dish that had spent generations alongside American dinners had made it all the way to the Clinton White House before fading from the American menu completely.

There is an obvious reason we don't see many relish trays anymore. Restaurant margins are tight. A pickle seems insignificant until you multiply it by every person who walks through the door. Someone buys it, preps it, plates it, serves it and washes the plate afterward. Nothing in a restaurant is actually free.

I don't think restaurants should start putting complimentary trays of food on every table again. I do think the relish tray represents something worth holding onto. You walked through the door, chose a restaurant and sat down, and the restaurant acknowledged that with a small gesture before asking you to spend another dollar.

There has to be a balance between protecting the margins that keep a restaurant alive and giving people something simply because they chose to walk through your door. That something doesn't have to be cottage cheese, olives or a pickle.

The important part is creating something a person might still remember sixty years later.

Top Tip

A soup made with potatoes and pickles? Finally, a pairing assignment I’m professionally qualified for…

Choose Grüner Veltliner. Dill pickle soup is sour, salty, creamy and herbal, so you want high acidity, very little oak and something fresh enough to handle all that pickle brine. Grüner gives you citrus, green apple and that slightly peppery quality that should work really well with dill and potato.

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