What are these for? I’ve seen sets like this many times but never figured out what they are. They always come in large quantities (I have 9 of these) and they’re small. These are roughly 2.5 inches across and they can be stacked.
I used google lens and it came up as a nut dish. Seems a little small for that.
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Yup, they’re nut dishes. But the key to understanding them is to realize that there’s a piece missing. There would have been perhaps a dozen small dishes, and one large serving dish, maybe 8" across. So, one’s guests would have used a serving spoon to dish some nuts out of the big dish, into their small dishes.
Of course, your guests, and mine, just grab great handfuls of nuts straight out of the bag. Standards have just collapsed! 
lol. Ya I think the serving sizes have gotten a little bigger too. Now everyone would get their own large serving dish. Speaking of which, I see a lot of these nut dishes being sold without a large serving dish. Did people usually mix and match or buy the serving dish separately?
Just guessing, but I would have thought that they’d have usually been sold as sets. After all, it wouldn’t be comme il faut to have Flintstones dishes with a Jetsons bowl.
They probably got separated because the large dishes would have been useful for all sorts of things. The little dishes, not so much.