This is the main Russian salad. It’s a legend of the New Year festive table. Olivier. Some make it with sausage and salted cucumbers, some use chicken and marinaded cucumbers. Every family has its own culinary secrets for this dish. In any argument as to whose Olivier “is the real deal” there can be no true winner. Establishing the original recipe is hard, just as it’s hard to say with one-hundred-percent accuracy who its author is. It’s a history that’s steeped in legend. It's believed that the salad was first made in the mid-19th century in Moscow. In the 1860s, a French chef, Lucien Olivier, worked at the Hermitage restaurant. Moscow’s beau monde was so in love with the dish that if you didn’t serve it at dinner, then it wouldn’t be regarded as a proper meal. The cunning chef, however, kept the authentic recipe a secret. The first “real” Olivier recipe only appeared in the Petersburg magazine “Our Food” in 1894, which is to say thirty years later. This version included hazel grouse, crayfish tails, beef tongue, red caviar, quail eggs, and capers. Soon, new variations on the renowned dish appeared. Authors in various publications would refer back to the reports of alleged eyewitnesses, such as students of Olivier himself and former guests at the Hermitage who said they had tried the dish and noted the ingredients down. There is no getting around the fact, however, that the original, pre-Revolutionary recipe for Olivier no longer exists. But nobody can stop modern chefs from experimenting with the dish. Head Chef Vladimir Pavlov offers his own version of the Olivier, with duck breast and a ginger mayonnaise. In the Geography of Taste on Russian Travel Guide.