Olivier is the salad that everyone in the world knows by the name Russian salad.

It seems to have been invented between 1860 and 1883 by the French chef Lucien Olivier at the Ermitage restaurant in Moscow.
At that time, the recipe included river shrimp, pheasants, veal tongue, potatoes, cucumbers, capers, olives, eggs, and caviar. It was all encased in an authentic aspic of gelatin.

In the mid-1930s after the October Revolution, Olivier salad was not prepared in the restaurants of the Russian capital because the ingredients were quite expensive. Many of them were therefore replaced with vegetables, and the new version was called “capital salad.”

But it was only shortly after World War II that the Soviet people, engaged in rebuilding the country, decided to make Olivier salad an indispensable dish during festivities.
Adding an element called the “Doctor’s Sausage” Doktorskaja, a cooked sausage that doctors recommended as a restorative food for those who had suffered from hunger.

And finally, Olivier reached its greatest popularity in the 1960s and 1970s when meat became relatively cheap again, and industrial mayonnaise appeared on the market.

Clearly, many recipes exist, each family has its own; the one that follows is as close as possible to the original post-war version.