It’s salad, Jim, but not as we know it.

When I grew up in the north of England, salad wasn’t unusual but it certainly was unspectacular. I’m not saying I’m common but salad was a couple of leaves of round lettuce, a tomato sliced into six and five or six slices of cucumber. The seasoning was salt. Posh people poured drizzled dressings over it. We didn’t, so salad for us was purely vegetables. In contrast...

Mushroom meadow

I have no scientific evidence for this, but I strongly believe that Russians consume more gallons of mayonnaise per person annually than any other nation and, of that mayonnaise, 99.9% goes in “salads”. My first experience of salad in a café over in Russia was what looked like an ice-cream or dessert dish lined with a leaf of round lettuce. The topping, a layer of grated cheese, hid the fact that the remainder was mayo with three or four prawns in. That’s typical of salads when eating out.

Salad in a dessert bowl

Salads for special occasions also contain vast quantities of the stuff and, boy, do they have an extensive array of salads for special occasions. There’s the national speciality - salat Olivier – diced potato, diced carrots, diced cucumber, peas, chopped beef, chopped egg, chopped onion and bucketloads of mayo. There’s herring under a fur coat - herring with potatoes, carrots, beetroot - all boiled and grated - chopped onion with... shitloads of the white stuff. Mushroom meadow also has sweetcorn, chicken, potato, carrot, cucumber, cheese and the eponymous champignons to dilute the mayonnaise. Or crab and sweetcorn salad... oh you get the idea (p.s. you also need grated cheese on that). As you may also gather from the number of times I wrote “diced” and “boiled”, these things take an aeon to prepare, carefully layering them artistically, and there’ll be a few of them. New Year is like oceans of mayonnaise arranged around everything else.

Crab and sweetcorn, front, Olivier, back, before the mayo

Thankfully, for everyday purposes, they just slice up a few veg and herbs and add some salt and oil or soured cream. Yummy.