Born between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Russian salad (born as Olivier salad because of its inventor Lucien Olivier) is a mix of potatoes, carrots, peas and mayonnaise, often with eggs, tuna or pickles, all cut into perfect cubes like in an edible mosaic. In reality, the name is partially misleading: this salad is not called “Russian” to indicate its origin, but hides a history made up of linguistic misunderstandings, bourgeois fashions and culinary journeys between Moscow, Paris and Turin. It is in fact the invention of the French chef Lucien Olivier, born in Russia, then reinterpreted in Piedmont.
To understand where the myth of the origin of this dish was born, you need to move to nineteenth-century Moscow, where in a fashionable restaurant called Hermitage, the French chef Lucien Olivier invent the salade à la russealso called lettuce Olivier. Given the gastronomic level of the place, it is not the simple version we know today: Olivier’s, in fact, is an opulent composition of game, lobster, caviar and other personal sauces; a true luxury recipe, perfect for surprising the richest customers of the time. After the restaurant closed, the original recipe was lost and over time it transformed from a noble dish into a more popular version.
At the same time, the fashion for “Russian-style” dishes spread in Europe, everything that sounded exotic or sumptuous took that name. Precisely in this context, between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the recipe arrives Piedmontwhere it undergoes a sort of “Italianization”: the original caviar and pheasant give way to potatoes and carrots, ingredients more within everyone’s reach.
Here Vialardi, chef of the Savoy family, proposed similar recipes already in the mid-nineteenth century: in some versions of his The king of chefs (both French and Piedmontese) we speak of “Piedmontese salad”, which over time becomes “Russian”. So the Russian salad is called this because at the time the expression “Russian style” did not indicate the origin, but was synonymous with “rich, opulent”, just like the first version of this dish.
The most common variant in Italian cuisine includes boiled vegetables (potatoes, carrots and peas), mayonnaise, some pickles and some more homely versions also add tuna, eggs or cooked ham. Since it is a cold dish, convenient and not too complicated to prepare, it presents itself as a successful buffet dish that pleases many palates at the table. Even the old Italian recipe books of the early twentieth century mention the famous Russian salad, having already gained a place of honor at banquets, so much so that books like the aforementioned The king of chefs by Giovanni Vialardi describe it with regional variations and different names.
Furthermore, it is curious that the salade piémontaise (more full-bodied, with eggs and ham), while in Spain and many Latin American countries theensaladilla rusaomnipresent in tapas.
In short, each country has appropriated this famous recipe in its own way, transforming an innovation born in Russian living rooms into an international comfort food. The Russian salad, therefore, is not Russian… perhaps it is not even Piedmontese or even Italian by extension. It is a dish that has traveled to different places, transforming itself but keeping the same name, at least for us, and becoming a classic.
