Russian Potato Salad: A Recipe for Salat Olivier

Salat Olivier takes center stage in the Eastern European holiday line up. This beloved mayonnaise-based potato salad has had a long and storied history invented during the heyday of Imperial Russia by a brilliant foreign chef. It featured exotic ingredients and was a crowd pleaser. After a decline in quality during the Soviet era, Salat Olivier is still an all-important holiday dish.

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Olivier Potato Salad The Centerpiece of the Easter European New Year

I don’t know what you’ll be doing on New Year’s Eve: probably getting your nails done and your hair blown out to prepare for a glitzy evening. Me? I’ll be up to my elbows in mayonnaise.

The classic Soviet era New Year’s menu is as resistant to change as the current regime. It all hinges on two mandatory, incredibly labor-intensive, mayonnaise-based cold salads: Salad Olivier, the traditional Russian potato salad (also known as salat olivye, olivye salad, salat olivier, ensaladilla rusa, ensalada rusa, salada russa, olivieh salad, and rus salatası), and Herring Under Fur Coat. While baffling in their appeal to any but the Russian palate, these nevertheless take pride of place on the festive board, alongside other zakuska: smoked meats, salted and smoked fish, caviar, and marinated and pickled vegetables.

Everyone thinks theirs is the best Salat Olivier salad recipe. In one of the opening scenes of the iconic Russian holiday film “The Irony of Fate,” the hero Zhenya’s mother resignedly dices potatoes, carrots, dill pickles, and Russian bologna for Russian Olivier salad to prepare for the upcoming new year’s celebration. She comments, in that long-suffering Orthodox Christian martyr manner Russian mothers-in-law have perfected down the ages, that Zhenya’s girlfriend, Galya, appears to be too busy to make the traditional New Year’s Menu for him, telling us all we need to know about Galya.

When a series of comical events forces Zhenya to spend New Year’s Eve with a different woman, Nadya, he drunkenly offers a very disparaging critique of her salads.  From this, we understand that Zhenya and Nadya’s long (like really, really long) process of falling in love has hit (yet another) speed bump in their (really, really, really long) journey to Happily Ever After.

The message of “Irony of Fate” is abundantly clear: if you want to get to Happily Ever After with your own romantic hero, then you too must master the art of the Russian New Year’s salad. And I’ve spent about two decades doing just that, which is why I now feel entitled to exercise a teeny bit of poetic license.

Learn more about great Russian Films with Jennifer’s Top Ten!

Looking for a great listen as you cook? Check out my podcast review

My Own Spin on Salat Olivier: Returning the Recipe to The Original Ingredients

Salat Olivier is the sine qua non of the New Year’s Eve menu. Everyone knows that. As much as I would love to divide the ingredients into separate and far more appetizing, like minted peas and roasted carrots alongside a creamy Dauphinoise potato, that will not fly. Everything gets dumped into a large bowl and mixed up with copious amounts of mayonnaise and sour cream.

But there is nothing in the unwritten playbook which prevents me from reverting to the original salad, pre-revolutionary recipe of Salat Olivier, which resembles the Soviet version as the Orient Express is to Metro North.

The Belgian Origins of Russia’s Most Iconic Holiday Dish

The creator of the original Russian salad recipe was not Russian at all, but renowned Belgian Chef Lucien Olivier. He invented this superstar of potato salad recipes — the salad that bears a version of his name — the late 19th century for an upscale Moscow restaurant. When the original recipe debuted, it was an instant hit with the restaurant’s tony patrons, largely thanks to the secret sauce, which Olivier kept a closely guarded secret throughout his life and ultimately took to his grave. We know, however, from enthusiastic contemporary accounts that it was subtly tart, velvety smooth, and slightly spicy.

Several nineteenth-century cookbook writers attempted to recreate the recipe, creating their own versions of Olivier salad, listing many fancy ingredients such as grouse and crayfish tails, which, let’s agree, are far more intriguing than bland, tinned ham.

It was the word “aspic,” in a recipe by P.P. Alexandrova-Ignatieva, in her 1909 cookbook The Practical Basics of the Culinary Arts that got me excited. Both mayonnaise and aspic arrived in Russia with the European chefs, who made elaborate decorative dishes of game and fish molded into their original shapes, coated with aspic. These dishes served in the smart salons and banqueting halls of the Russian nobility were usually served decorated with Sauce Provençal or mayonnaise. Mayonnaise and aspic marched through late Imperial Russian cuisine like twin warriors.

My version of Salad Olivier is no less time consuming than the Soviet version — it will take you a couple of hours to prep the vegetables, cutting them into a half inch dice (though a good mandoline can save lots of time and energy) and make the aspic. Some readers have raised their eyebrows at the seemingly unnecessary step of adding gelatin cubes, but trust me, it really elevates this unique potato salad into something very special: even HRH admits he prefers this version to any other, and always requests it on any special occasion.

How to Serve Salat Olivier

My preferred method for serving Salad Olivier is to scoop small amounts into pastry tart shells, individual china ramekins, small ceramic serving spoons, or in small shot glasses. The presentation looks better than a massive mound of potato salad, and single servings won’t slip and slide as much as the evening progresses. Of course, when the evening is over, all bets are off, and the dish reverts to the comfort food/hangover blotting paper it is!