Olivier Salad

What to expect

Taste

Rich first, then sharp, and the sharpness is what stops it being stodgy. Mayonnaise is the dominant flavour by volume and everything else is set against it. Brined cucumber is the counterweight: salty, sour, fermented, and it needs to be the proper barrel-type rather than a sweet gherkin, because sweetness on top of mayonnaise is cloying. Potato and carrot are sweet and mild. Egg is rich and slightly sulphurous. Peas bring a distinct sweetness and are one of the few bright flavours in the bowl. Onion, diced small, is pungent and is the reason it divides opinion. Dill is the characteristic finish and is more assertive than it looks. Salt has to be judged at the end, because the pickles, the brine and the meat are all bringing their own.

Aroma

Mild, which is characteristic of cold food. Dill is the most obvious note and is what makes the bowl smell Russian rather than generically of mayonnaise. Under it, pickle brine and egg. It is not an aromatic dish and never has been.

Texture

Everything hinges on the dice. Eight millimetres, evenly, so that a spoonful carries several different things and each is distinguishable. Potato is soft, carrot firmer, pickle crunchy, pea bursting, egg soft, meat chewy — six textures in one mouthful, held in something smooth. Cut unevenly or overcooked, all of that collapses into one texture and the salad becomes what its reputation abroad suggests.

Sound

None. It is a cold assembled dish and the only audible thing is the crunch of the pickle, which is a genuine cue that they were the right kind.

How the flavour moves

Mayonnaise first and coating. Then the sweetness of pea and carrot. Then the pickle arriving sharp and salty and cutting through. Dill at the finish. The arc is short and the salad is designed to be eaten repeatedly across an evening rather than contemplated, which is exactly what happens to it.

Serve it

Cold, from the fridge. It is noticeably worse at room temperature, where the mayonnaise loosens and the fat becomes obvious.

Goes with

Everything else on a Russian holiday table, which is the honest answer — herring under a fur coat, cold cuts, pickles, black bread, and a great deal of vodka. Beyond that it is very good with cold roast meat and as part of a picnic. Where it fails is as a course on its own and next to anything else creamy.

Cook's notes

Difficulty

Easy and tedious. There is no technique in it and there is a great deal of knife work, and the whole thing depends on patience with the cooling.

Cost

Low. Potatoes, carrots, eggs, peas and whatever meat you use.

Equipment

A large pan, a sharp knife and a very large bowl. Nothing else.

When to make it

New Year, celebrations, and picnics. It is cold-weather food by association and warm-weather food by nature.

Best season

None.

You know it is done when

A skewer into a potato or a carrot should meet no resistance and the vegetable should not fall apart on the skewer. Overcooked potato turns the finished salad to paste when it is folded.

And it feels like

Every dice should hold its shape and its edges after folding. If the bowl looks like mashed potato with peas in it, the vegetables were overcooked or over-stirred.

Food safety

This is a cold dish containing egg, mayonnaise and cooked meat and it is traditionally left on a table for several hours, which is worth being plain about. Keep it refrigerated until it is served, do not leave it out for more than two hours in a warm room, and eat it within two days. If you have made your own mayonnaise, treat it as a raw-egg dish and be stricter still.

Where it goes wrong

Dressing it warm, which is the fault — the mayonnaise thins, the salad goes greasy and it never recovers. Peeling and cutting the vegetables before boiling, which waterlogs them. Overcooking the potatoes. Uneven dice. Sweet pickled gherkins instead of brined cucumbers. And over-stirring after the mayonnaise goes in, which breaks the cubes down into paste.

If it does go wrong

Thin and greasy: it was dressed warm. Chilling will firm it a little and will not fix it. Pasty: the potatoes were overcooked or it was over-mixed. Bland: salt, then more pickle brine — it is almost always short of acid rather than of salt. Too sharp: more mayonnaise or another boiled potato. Watery in the bowl the next day: the cucumbers were not drained.

Making it ahead

Boil and cool everything a day ahead. Dress it a few hours before serving rather than the night before, since the salad is at its best in the first day.

Keeping it

Two days in the fridge. The potato firms and the dressing thins slightly.

Reheating

Never.

Freezing

No.

Leftovers

It is designed to produce them — Olivier is made in quantity and eaten over several days at New Year, which is the entire tradition.

Scaling it

Freely, and it is traditionally made in absurd quantity. The dicing is the only limit on your enthusiasm.

Substitutions

This is where the argument lives. Boiled beef is closer to the original spirit; boiled chicken is common; Soviet and post-Soviet households overwhelmingly use doktorskaya kolbasa, a soft boiled sausage, and anybody who grew up on that version considers it correct. Brined cucumbers — the salty fermented kind, not sweet pickled gherkins — are essential and sweet pickles make a genuinely worse salad. Homemade mayonnaise transforms it, and there is a recipe for it in this collection.

Dietary swaps

Not vegan. Vegetarian without the meat, which is a normal variation rather than a compromise. Gluten-free and nut-free depending on the sausage. Contains eggs and mustard and sulphites through the mayonnaise.

Shopping for it

Waxy potatoes, which hold their dice. Brined cucumbers from an eastern European shop — the salty fermented kind in a jar, not sweet gherkins. Good ham or a piece of beef boiled for the purpose. Fresh dill.

Keeping the cost down

It is already cheap and it stretches whatever meat is in it a very long way — 300g across eight servings. Homemade mayonnaise costs a fraction of a jar and is the single biggest improvement available to this dish.

Sustainability

Good — root vegetables, eggs, a small amount of meat spread across eight servings, and no waste.

Nutrition

Around 380 calories a serving, most of it mayonnaise. Underneath that it is potato, carrot, egg and peas, which is a genuinely reasonable set of things; the dressing is what makes the numbers. Using less mayonnaise and a little more pickle brine cuts it meaningfully.

Worth it?

Worth it, and worth doing carefully. Everything that gives Russian salad its dismal reputation abroad comes from carelessness — warm potatoes, sweet pickles, uneven dice, jarred mayonnaise — and every one of those is free to fix. Made properly with homemade mayonnaise and proper brined cucumbers it is a genuinely good thing, and it feeds eight for the price of a takeaway.

Where it comes from

Origin

Moscow, in the 1860s, at the Hermitage restaurant.

Also called

Salat Olivier. In Soviet canteen nomenclature it became Stolichny — 'of the capital' — which is the name the standardised recipe carried. Outside the former Soviet Union it is Russian salad, ensaladilla rusa in Spain, salade russe in France.

Said out loud

sa-LAHT o-lee-vee-YEH.

What the name means

The chef's surname. Lucien Olivier was Belgian-French and ran a French restaurant in Moscow, which makes 'Russian salad' a name given from the outside to a French dish that Russia adopted.

History

Olivier's original was a luxury dish and its published descriptions — none of them from him — mention grouse, veal tongue, crayfish tails, capers and caviar, dressed with a mayonnaise he made himself and never disclosed. The story goes that he was so protective of it that no one ever learned the sauce, and that a sous-chef's attempted reconstruction was the beginning of everything that followed. What is certain is that the dish outlived both the chef and the restaurant, and that the Soviet period transformed it: shortage substituted potato and carrot for game and shellfish, doktorskaya kolbasa for veal tongue, and tinned peas for anything more elaborate. The result is a dish whose international reputation as bland and stodgy is entirely a product of what it became rather than what it was.

Why it matters

It is the New Year dish. Russian and post-Soviet households make it in enormous quantities for New Year's Eve and eat it for days afterwards, and the smell of it is as tied to the holiday as a Christmas pudding is in Britain. It travelled with the Soviet sphere of influence and is a fixture from Cuba to Vietnam.

When it is eaten

New Year above all. Birthdays, celebrations, and any table that needs filling.

The traditional way

Nothing beyond dicing and patience. The evenness of the dice is treated as a real measure of care and is how a good Olivier is told from a careless one.

How it changed

Completely, and downwards, and then partially back. The original was a restaurant luxury; the Soviet version was a canteen staple; modern Russian cooks increasingly make it with better meat and homemade mayonnaise, which brings it some way back towards where it started.

Regional variations

The meat is the variable and it is regional and generational. Ham, boiled beef, boiled chicken and boiled sausage all have their partisans. Some versions include apple, which is common in Ukraine. Spanish ensaladilla rusa uses tuna and is genuinely good.

How this version differs

It uses ham or boiled beef rather than sausage, which is a step towards the older version. The spoonful of pickle brine in the dressing is not universal and is a real improvement.

Sources and credit

Lucien Olivier at the Hermitage, 1860s, which is the settled account of the dish's origin even though the recipe itself is not.

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