Sałatka jarzynowa

The story

Sałatka jarzynowa, literally vegetable salad, is the finely diced root-vegetable and mayonnaise salad that turns up at almost every Polish celebration. At Easter it sits on the cold table next to ham, pâtés and stuffed eggs. It is just as expected on Christmas Eve and at birthday and name-day parties, and hardly any two households make it exactly the same way.

Its ancestry is disputed. One line leads to the French macédoine of the 18th century, a salad of small, evenly cut vegetables. Another leads to the salad that the Belgian chef Lucien Olivier created in the 1860s at the Hermitage restaurant in Moscow, made with luxuries such as veal tongue, grouse, crayfish tails and caviar. As the idea spread, cheaper ingredients took over. In Poland the salad settled on the vegetables already cooked in every kitchen for chicken broth, carrots, parsley root and celery root, plus potatoes, eggs, fermented pickles, peas and often a tart apple. The form known today took shape after 1945, and in communist Poland it was also a standard bar snack served with vodka.

Cook the vegetables a day ahead and dice them small and even. The salad goes well beside baked ham or a slice of pâté.