There’s no real celebration without it – it’s omnipresent, sustainable and downright delicious. ‘Sałatka jarzynowa’ (vegetable salad) is a beloved Polish staple that we often take for granted, but it’s also the cause of infinite conflicts in Polish households. And, well, it’s not necessarily Polish at all. Let’s get to the bottom of its story.
In its most basic version, sałatka jarzynowa consists of cubed boiled vegetables that are usually used in a stock – carrots, parsley roots and celeriacs – mixed with dill pickles, green peas (usually from a can) and mayonnaise. Other ingredients are more controversial: some people add potatoes, some swear by the addition of sour apples, some believe it tastes better with a hard-boiled egg. There are those who like it with canned corn, though others consider it a blasphemy. Fortunately, my grandma’s experiments from the 1990s, when she added olives and capers, not necessarily knowing what they were, never caught on… and yet she was on to something.
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Capers, alongside caviar, pickles, smoked duck, veal tongue and sauce Provençal were the ingredients of a salad created by a Russian chef of Belgian origins, Lucien Olivier. The exact recipe for his signature dish – especially the recipe for the sauce, which included French wine vinegar, mustard, and Provençal olive oil – was his secret, until his sous-chef in the Moscow Hermitage restaurant Ivan Ivanov took a peek at Olivier making it.
According to the legend, when Olivier was called to the front of the house, Ivanov went into his private kitchen where the chef used to work alone and observed his mise en place. Later, when the cook started working in the less elegant restaurant Moskva, he decided to serve his own version, which he called stolichny – ‘from the capital’.
Another version of the legend states that a curious client ordered the salad so many times, he was finally able to recreate its recipe perfectly. In yet another version, the recipe was recreated by Olivier’s collaborators only after his death, since he took his secret to the grave in 1883. We’ll probably never know what happened exactly, but we do have access to some recipes like the oldest one published in Наша пища (Our Food) magazine in March 1894 and the most famous one from Pelagia Aleksandrov-Ignatieff’s book Руководство к изучению основ кулинарного искусства (A Guide to Learning the Basics of Culinary Art). The ingredients Alexandrov-Ignatieff mentions are half a hazel grouse, a big pickled gherkin, two potatoes, 3-4 lettuce leaves, 3 crayfish tails, a teaspoon of capers, 3-5 olives, half a cup of cubed meat jelly and 1.5 tablespoons of sauce Provençal or mayonnaise.
OK, but what’s the connection between this fancy concoction and the humble boiled-vegetable fare of all the celebrations at our grandma’s house?
After the 1905 and then the 1917 revolutions, Russian aristocrats who had to leave the country popularised the dish in Western Europe. Even now in many Spanish and Italian bars you can find ensalada rusa or insalata russa – Russian salads. And yet they have almost nothing to do with Olivier’s recipe. Rare, expensive ingredients (let’s be frank – not many housewives have access to hazel grouse and crayfish, and sure they didn’t have it in the Soviet Union) have been replaced by common ones, turning Olivier’s luxurious dish into a great example of kitchen economy: most home cooks just make the salad with left-over vegetables after making a broth (or, in Poland, rosół). In the Soviet or ‘post-revolutionary’ version, hazel grouse was replaced by sausage, crayfish with carrots and capers with canned peas. Basically, only mayonnaise remained.
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Sałatka śledziowa, fot. Bartosz Krupa/East News
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And yet there is also a completely different version of the salad’s history, which traces its origins to the French recipes for macédoine. The term – which possibly alludes to the different origins of the people in Alexander the Great’s empire – first appears in French cookbooks in the 18th century (which is also the time when mayonnaise makes its first appearance in print) and it denotes a salad made with a variety of cubed vegetables or fruits – nowadays in countries like Spain, Italy, Greece, Romania and sometimes Poland as well, it’s used mostly for fruit desserts. In France, ‘vegetable macédoine’ nowadays usually includes green beans and turnip, but historically many different vegetables were added – asparagus, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts and so on.
This understanding would suggest we aren’t necessarily dealing with a specific recipe, but rather with a category of dishes – mixed vegetable salads made with cubed, and at least partially boiled ingredients – that can vary from country to country
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Silesian szałot, photo: Łukasz Zandecki/AW
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In Poland, the vegetarian version is most common, although some people add cubed ham; the Silesian szałot – a bit of a hybrid between Russian salad and the German potato salad, includes potatoes, gherkins and either sausage or herring. Sałatka śledziowa – herring salad –usually includes potatoes, gherkins, onions and sometimes beetroot (which is very popular in Russia), is also a member of the same salad family. In the south of Europe, where herring is not popular, tuna is often included. In Iran it is used as a sandwich filler, whilst in Cieszyn on the Polish-Czech border it’s served on bread as one of the city’s famous open-faced sandwiches. In Turkey, jacket potatoes called kumpir are often filled with ‘Russian salad’; in Croatia and Slovenia a similar recipe is used, but it is called a ‘French salad’. In Scandinavia carrots and green peas with mayo bear the name of… ‘Italian salad’.
And yet we’d swear by it being Polish!
Written by Natalia Mętrak-Ruda, Jan 2022
