Salads embody many ideas for culinary combination. They are prepared as an appetizer, as a main course or for dessert. However, there is such a category of salads, without which it is difficult to imagine a festive feast. And Olivier salad is one of them.
The famous salad maker
The youngest of the Olivier brothers, Lucien was born in 1838 in France. Wanting to realize himself as a culinary specialist, he left for Russia and in 1860 opened a French restaurant in the center of Moscow.
The main public visiting expensive restaurants at that time were merchants who did not have exquisite manners, which to some extent contributed to the emergence of the salad.
The Hermitage restaurant, where Lucien Olivier worked as a chef, was famous for its exquisite cuisine, and all Moscow gourmets hunted for the family recipe for Mayon sauce. Mustard and several secret spices were added to the mayonnaise - this family secret allowed Olivier's ancestors to earn a huge fortune.
Lucien jealously guarded the sauce recipe from prying eyes and daily prepared the required amount of dressing with his own hand, locked in a room without windows. Alas, this culinary mystery was never solved, and we will never know the true taste of the legendary sauce.
Game mayonnaise
The initial interest in French cuisine begins to melt, the public is no longer familiar with the usual delicacies, and even a piquant sauce does not save the day. Fearing losses and worried about his reputation, Olivier decides to create a completely new dish.
Fillets of hazel grouse on green lettuce leaves are arranged with boiled tongue and layers of broth jelly, crayfish necks and lobster pieces along the edges of the dish. In the center of this gastronomic splendor is a slide of sliced potatoes with gherkins and slices of boiled eggs, all sprinkled with mayonnaise - this is what the dish looked like, which is destined to turn into a famous salad.
The birth of "Olivier"
The new dish, a culinary masterpiece, brought the restaurant back in popularity; Game Mayonnaise was in great demand. Once Olivier noticed that the merchant, who ordered a novelty for lunch, mixed all the ingredients of the dish into a homogeneous porridge and ate it with appetite.
According to the chef's idea, potatoes with cucumbers and eggs in the center of the dish played the role of decoration, such a disdain for his creation greatly offended Olivier. The next day, he deliberately mixed all the ingredients and served them on the table. Lucien expected indignation from the visitors, but they willingly diminished their food with bread and asked for more.
So, a complex French dish turned into a Russian salad named after its creator. Several times Olivier changed the salad recipe, adding either pressed caviar or partridges. But the main secret about the spices that gave the sauce a signature taste, he did not reveal to anyone.
In wealthy houses, they began to serve salad at dinner parties, personal chefs of the nobles created their own versions of recipes, but no one was able to exactly repeat Olivier's masterpiece.
Over time, the hazel grouses were replaced by chicken and sausage, and the salad got another name "Stolichny", but this is a completely different story.
