Not Chicken, Tuna Or Pasta: The Old-School Picnic Salad Most People Forgot About

The classic picnic salad is a carefully considered thing. It's often protein heavy, works well on bread, crackers, or cut veggies, and, most importantly, travels well. A salad that meets this criteria can be hard to come by, so many of us rely on the classics like chicken salad, tuna salad, or pasta salad. And while there are ways to zhuzh up your basics, like with this summer BLT pasta salad recipe, it can be difficult to find a new picnic salad that is the exact perfect fit for the rotation. But there's an old-school salad nobody eats anymore that needs to make a comeback: salad Olivier, also known as Russian potato salad.

Salad Olivier sounds quite fancy, but it's really a fairly humble yet all-encompassing picnic salad that's like potato salad, egg salad, and a meat-based salad all rolled into one delicious dish. The basic components of salad Olivier include diced potatoes, vegetables like peas and carrots, hardboiled eggs, a meat (often cubed ham), chopped pickles, and a mayonnaise-heavy dressing that also includes savory ingredients like Dijon mustard and Worcestershire sauce.

But the beauty of salad Olivier is that you can feel free to use the ingredients you have on hand. Add in bell peppers, cucumbers, or green onions if you have them in the fridge. Pop in some olives for a salty, briny touch. Salad Olivier is the perfect picnic salad because it's endlessly customizable; you can throw in what you like and leave out what you don't to ensure that there won't be any leftovers you have to lug back home in your cooler.

Salad Olivier was created by chef Lucien Olivier in the 1860s at L'Hermitage, an upscale Moscow restaurant, and the original recipe evolved heavily over time to become the perfect picnic salad we know today. But as with lots of dishes around the world, many countries developed their own variations of salad Olivier, call it by different names, and include different traditional ingredients. There are dozens of versions of this potato-based salad that are all slightly different and emblematic of the cultures from which they arose.

The Polish version is vegetarian, while the Romanian version uses cooked beef as its meat. The Spanish twist on the basic potato salad involves canned tuna fish and sometimes shrimp, anchovies, and/or roasted red peppers, which give it a whole other dimension. And Persian salad Olivier often uses chicken instead of ham. Basically, you can make salad Olivier however you want to in order to achieve the picnic salad of your dreams.