The Russian Salad: a New Year's Eve tale

It’s 1pm on the 31st of December, the snow is falling and our windows are steamed up from the pots boiling on the stove. Each contains carrots, potatoes and eggs for the centrepiece salad, which will grace the festive table later that evening. The salad is called Olivier in Russia but to the rest of the world it is known as the Russian salad. There’s a bowl of tangerines and two champagne flutes as my mom and I prepare for our chopping marathon. The salad consists of many ingredients - potatoes, green peas, gherkins, carrots, eggs and boiled chicken breast - which must be finely diced. If you are like me you will find this process meditative, if you are like my mom, it might be a real test of your patience. But either way, this ritual is sacred for us both.

Our cooking would not be complete without The Irony of Fate, an iconic 1970s New Year-themed film, playing on the background. Its nostalgic piano soundtrack makes the dance of the snowflakes outside seem nothing short of magical. I stop to marvel at the idea that at this very moment millions of other mom-daughter duets are involved in the exact same act across the country. I will never know who they are but for this very special moment in time the Olivier salad connects me to them all.

The history of the dish is as complex as the history of those 100 years that saw its transformation from a delicacy in a bourgeois restaurant of 1860s to an absolute staple in every Soviet family by the 1970s. Like many Soviet-era culinary classics, the Olivier has its roots in pre-Revolutionary French-inspired cuisine. Invented by Lucien Olivier, head chef of a prestigious L’Hermitage restaurant in Moscow, the original has almost nothing in common with the Soviet version. It was an hors d’oevre consisting of ingredients like grouse, cornichons, crayfish tales, capers, peas, potatoes and caviar, elegantly plated and dressed with chef’s signature sauce. Most customers, however, preferred mixing everything up on the plate, so the chef eventually turned the dish into a salad. Olivier’s creation acquired a cult status and while he kept its recipe a secret, many contemporary cookbooks published their guess-work. 

The dish departed even further from its origins with the beginning of the Russian revolution in 1917. In the following 70 years of the Soviet regime, waves of emigrants left the country, taking their food heritage along. The dish, globally known as the Russian salad, proved to have universal appeal and easy adaptability, often being reduced to a potato and carrot salad. These days we can encounter the Russian salad as far and wide as a farinata shop in Leguria (just as I did on my holiday there a few years ago), a Spanish tapas bar in London or an old Persian cookbook. 

While the émigré versions of the salad went on a global quest, its Soviet fate was to temporarily fall into an oblivion. It re-appeared in the 1930s as a re-branded Soviet version introduced by Lucien Olivier’s former apprentice. He called the salad Stolichnyi (the name, from Russian for ‘capital’, remains interchangeable with ‘Olivier’), replacing the expensive ingredients with chicken, carrots and fermented cucumbers; bulking it up with potatoes and peas, and drenching the whole in Soviet mayonnaise. The condiment, which has little in common with the French dressing, was the new Soviet super food at the time. High in calories and full of tang it infused any dish with nutrients and flavour. The government’s impressive PR campaign propagated new mayo-based recipes, including the Olivier-cum-Stolichyi salad. The problem was though, typical of the Soviet era, there was not enough mayo to match the demand of a huge country. And so the only place where one could enjoy the famed condiment and its dishes were restaurants and food stores in major cities. 

Nothing works better to ignite the appetite than unattainability, so when mayo shortages improved somewhat towards the 1970s, every household was busy making the Olivier salad. However, my mom recalls, they still had to stand long queues for most of the ingredients. If you came across jars of mayo and tinned peas in August you’d get as many as you’d be permitted, ‘two items per pair of hands’ was a popular phrase in Soviet retail lingo, and would keep them until a birthday, a wedding or the New Years Eve. The Olivier salad was a perfect dish for that special winter holiday. The majority of the ingredients were cheap, while the hunt for mayo and peas made it a ‘delicacy’; it was nutrient-rich, therefore perfect for all-night drinking; and it kept for days - ah, the joy of having the Olivier for a hangover breakfast on January 1st (ok, and on the 2nd too). Coupled with popular films featuring the salad in their new years eve mise-en-scene, and the dish became synonymous with that holiday. 

While every family might make its own variation of the salad, adding chicken and apples instead of the Doctor sausage and boiled carrots, the serving measure is uniform - a huge enamel bowl, called ‘taz’ in Russian. However, on the table the salad would be displayed in a festive cut crystal bowl, which always reminded me of an ice sculpture. That bowl would be topped up repeatedly during the feast, as we’d all tuck in, pushing the salad onto the fork with a slice of rye bread and washing it down with a sparkling sugary drink (a kid’s soda or ‘Soviet champagne’ for adults). 

At around 11:40pm everyone would try to squeeze in one more mouthful of the salad as we prepare to bid farewell to the old year and raise a glass to the new one. And so to me the salad always tastes of excitement for new things to come.

a version of this piece is originally published in The Economist 2020

Recipe

Here I offer a slightly updated modernised version of the salad which (horror, oh, horror) excludes the mayo! But if you’d like to go the traditional route (which I’d also like to do from time to time) just supplement the dressing with mayo in the same ratio.

For the salad 

2 medium potatoes 

2 medium carrots 

2 hard-boiled eggs

1/2 cup of defrosted green peas 

2 medium pickled or fermented Kirkby cucumbers (see recipe on page X)

2 medium boiled chicken breasts (optional)

For the dressing 

200g of creme fraiche 

200g of Greek yoghurt 

1 small bunch of dill, finely chopped 

Juice of 1/2 lemon 

Salt and pepper to taste

The cooking method for this salad could not be simpler, yet also more time consuming. 

Peel and boil the potatoes and carrots in a lightly salted water. Depending on their sizes, they will need around 25-35 minutes.

You can reuse the water to boil the eggs, which will need about 8 minutes, or boil them at the same time in a different pot. Once their time is up place them under a stream of cold water for a few moments. Peel and set aside.

To defrost the peas simply place them in a colander and pour some boiling water over them. 

Once all the veggies and the eggs are cooked, dice them along with the cucumbers as identically as you can and mix in a large bowl (or a taz if you happen to have one).

I prefer my salad vegetarian but you can (as millions of Russians do) add the boiled chicken breast or some type of poached meat to the mix.

To make the dressing put all of the ingredients into a bowl and give them a good stir.

Add the dressing to the chopped veggies and mix thoroughly. 

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