Bœuf salad

This became in time a Romanian traditional dish, but its origins are from the old Russian cuisine. The name sounds French because actually a French chef prepared this in the years 1800 for a famous restaurant in Moscow. Nowadays it’s a "must" for the New Year’s Eve or for other festive dinners. There are a lot of ways of doing this salad, but the basic ingredients are always the same: potatoes, carrots, parsnip, pickles and mayonnaise. You can add also a lots of other ingredients, as boiled meat (especially beef or white lean meat) or ham, peas, apple, etc. If it’s made with meat, then we call it “bœuf salad”, if it’s without, then it’s “a la Rousse salad”.

Very often I do this together with the chicken soup with semolina dumplings (click here to see the recipe), because for this soup you use the vegetables just to make the broth. So let’s start!

Ingredients (approximated quantities)

4 medium size potatoes

4 carrots

1-2 parsnips

1 small celery

200-300 g pickled cucumbers

1 small can peas (optional)

150-200 g ham or lean meat (chicken/turkey breast or beef/veal)

150-200 g mayonnaise

1-2 tsp mustard

salt and pepper

Method

Wash the potatoes very good, but don’t peal and don’t cut them, otherwise, after boiling, they will become too soft and will crash. Boil them in a large pot with enough salty water. Try them with a fork to see if they are ready. If the fork goes easily inside, turn off the heat and take the potatoes out of the water. Leave them to cool down a little bit and them peal them.

Boil together the vegetables (carrots, parsnip, celery) and the meat (not necessary if you use ham), everything entire, in plenty salty water. Try them with the fork too and if ready, take them out of the liquid. Leave them for a while to cool down too. As I said before, you can make out of the broth a delicious soup with semolina dumplings.

Dice as small as possible the vegetables, potatoes, meat or ham and the pickles.

Mix them together with the peas, mustard, salt, pepper and the mayo (keep a small quantity of mayo for decoration).

Arrange on a platter and add the rest of mayo and smooth over the surface with a knife.

Decorate with parsley leaves, black olives or sliced boiled eggs. Flower designs are very popular.

Enjoy it!

My tips:

1. I strongly recommend you to use home made mayo. It’s very easy to do it and it taste a lot better then the commercial one. Here is my recipe for this.

2. For a very special taste, you can add to the salad a small apple, pealed and diced.

3. I’m using a special cube slicer, which makes the cutting in small dices very easy.

4. For a real Romanian salad you can use 100 g pickled red bell pepper, and then just 100 g sour pickles. I know it’s difficult to find these pickled peppers, but if you have a Romanian shop near by, really worth it.

#festiverecipes #potato #beef #ham #vegetables #mayonnaise #leanmeat