From Lucien Olivier (Люсьен Оливье) to today's Russian salad...
Gastronomy (*)
Could "Olivier Salad" (Салат оливье) be a Belgian-Russian salad ?...
Known internationally (and often "adapted" to local taste and resources) under the name "Russian salad", it remains, among other things, an essential dish for New Year's celebrations in Russia, where it still bears the name of its most famous interpreter...
From Lucien Olivier (Люсьен Оливье) to today's Russian salad...
It was in 1860 that the (originally) Belgian Chef Lucien Olivier opened the restaurant "l'Ermitage" (ресторань "Эрмитажь") on Troubnaïa Square in Moscow. Restaurant which offered the very Francophile high society of the time fine French cuisine accompanied by wines and cognacs presented as "saved from the cellar of Louis XVI during the revolution"... The most popular dish was a variation of Russian salad specially developed by the Chef, to match the taste of his Russian customers both in terms of food and in terms of "external signs of wealth"... Its fame was such that Tsar Alexander II ( Александр II Николаевич) himself decided to come to taste it.
What was it made of? The secret was jealously guarded, the Chef having a separate room set up in the kitchens, to which only he had access, and in which he prepared HIS salad himself, which therefore fully deserved to bear his name. It was in fact a combination of expensive dishes (which included grouse and crayfish) in a special mayonnaise, the secret of which Lucien Olivier will take in the grave... There was, in fact, an indelicate assistant, Ivan Ivanov, who one day took advantage of the fact that the Chef had to be absent, forgetting to lock the door, to enter the room and write down the ingredients. He was then hired as a chef in another restaurant (the "Moskva") where he offered a curiously similar salad, under the name столичный салат (°), without however managing to convince the gastronomes of the time. The copy did not live up to the original. Later, he sold his recipe to several culinary magazines, each time replacing the overpriced ingredients with simpler ones...
But the fame of the original, the Olivier Salad, was such that the name will stand the test of time. And even if today's salad is very different from what it was back then, it remains the most emblematic Russian salad. Created by a great Chef for the palates of high society, today enthroned on the New Year's dinner table of every Russian family, an integral part of the culture of an entire people.
Note: there are two countries in the world where mayonnaise is an institution: Russia and Belgium. Guess that Lucien Olivier has probably something to do with it...
(*) The word "Гастроиом" in Russian means the equivalent of our "grocery stores"
(°) "столичный" literally means "from the capital".
A modern recipe: https://www.enjoyyourcooking.com/salads/russian-salad-olivier.html
- It is important to cut all ingredients into similar sized pieces.
- In the recipe they talk about "medium size cucumbers". They are in fact "ogurets", a popular vegetable in Russia if ever there was one, of which I have never been able to determine, with certainty, whether they are small cucumbers or large gherkins... Traditional preservation is in brine (lacto-fermented), which is almost impossible to find in Belgium... Otherwise, large sweet and sour gherkins may be suitable.
- Our Belgian "ham sausage" does the job very well.
Other Intercultural Notes...
"Si vis pacem..." the article, some kind of manifesto of our association.
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