Change Up Basic Potato Salad With 3 Simple Ingredients For A Spanish Twist

With no insult meant to American-style potato salad, beloved at potlucks and cookouts, it is nevertheless commonly perceived as a side dish. However, Spain's national take on potato salad is substantive enough to act as a meal in itself. And fortunately, this Spanish twist on a basic potato salad can be achieved with the addition of just three ingredients.

The foundation of Ensaladilla Rusa will be familiar to anyone who's ever thrown together a simple potato salad, so for those keen to try the Spanish equivalent, you can start with our recipe for a classic southern potato salad, then modify it accordingly. To a base of boiled potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, mayonnaise, mustard, garlic, salt, and pepper, add diced, boiled carrots, boiled peas, and drained, canned tuna fish. These additions produce a truly spectacular amalgamation of potato salad and tuna salad, with the extra vegetables providing brightness and textural contrast. For convenience, the potatoes, carrots, and peas can all be boiled in the same pot, though you should make sure to add the carrots only in the last eight to 10 minutes of cooking, and the peas in the last five to six minutes to ensure they're not overcooked.

For a hearty lunch, you really don't need anything more to enjoy Ensaladilla Rusa than a few slices of baguette or a similar bread to scoop it up. If you're thinking of including it in a more elaborate dinner, you should instead consider serving it in the Spanish style with a selection of other tapas — should you be in need of inspiration, run through our list of 29 traditional Spanish tapas dishes.

Those of you who know your Spanish may be wondering why the name of this dish translates as "Little Russian Salad." The answer lies in Ensaladilla Rusa's rather complicated history. The general view among culinary historians is that its roots lie in Olivier salad, a famously elaborate dish created in 1860 by Lucien Olivier, a Moscow-based chef of either French or Belgian background. While Olivier's version reportedly included luxurious ingredients such as caviar, beef tongue, aspic, grouse, and crayfish, by the time of the Soviet Union, the dish had evolved to make use of less expensive staples, including peas, eggs, pickles, and various kinds of cheaper meat. You can read more about what made this Russian potato salad unique here, but it would eventually be adapted further into regional variations by numerous countries around the world, including Spain.

It should be emphasized that while tuna, carrots, and peas are all that's needed to elevate your everyday potato salad into Ensaladilla Rusa, they are far from the only additions one can make. You will find recipes for Ensaladilla Rusa that feature aioli, shrimp, roasted red peppers, olives, capers, anchovies, and more, so you should feel free to compare different takes on the dish before settling on one that will best suit your palate. You may even want to think up a few surprise ingredients of your own — given Ensaladilla Rusa's history, nothing could be more appropriate.