“Cook whatever you like,” Chekhov said. And if you ever needed proof that a dish can wander the world, reinvent itself, survive empires, and still end up on every family table from Moscow to Buenos Aires, look no further than Olivier Salad—Russia’s most beloved, argued-over bowl of chopped vegetables and mayo.

It didn’t start that way, of course. In the 1860s, Moscow was a city of chandeliers, silk gloves, and winter nights that seemed to stretch into eternity. At the Hermitage restaurant—a temple of French cuisine in the middle of tsarist Russia—a Belgian chef named Lucien Olivier created the kind of dish meant for people who could afford to never ask the price. Grouse, caviar, crayfish tails, capers, and a dressing he guarded like state secrets. The original Olivier wasn’t a salad; it was a flex.

But after Olivier died, an apprentice leaked a version—stripped down, democratized, and much more in line with what regular Russians could actually get their hands on. Over decades and revolutions, through shortages, wars, and the long gray winters of the Soviet era, that once-lavish creation was reborn as something simpler: potatoes, carrots, peas, pickles, eggs, maybe some chicken or ham, all folded together with mayonnaise. A dish built not for tsars, but for survival.

And that’s when Olivier Salad became truly Russian.

By the mid-20th century, it was impossible to picture New Year’s Eve without it. While Christmas faded under Soviet secularism, New Year’s grew into the season’s shining holiday—champagne, mandarins, television specials, and a giant bowl of Olivier sitting proudly at the center of the table. It was practical. It was filling. You could make a mountain of it from cheap ingredients that kept through bitter cold. Yet eating it—really eating it—felt festive, like a small luxury carved out of the everyday struggle.

What’s wild is how far it traveled.

The dish seeped into every corner of the former Soviet sphere, changing accents the way people do when they move. Poles added apples. Persians swapped in shredded chicken and turned it into a sandwich filling. Spaniards folded in tuna and made it a tapa. In Turkey it became lighter, in the Baltics smokier, in South America nearly unrecognizable except for the mayo and the memory.

Every country, every family, every grandmother has her own rules about what must be included and what will lead to exile.

But that’s the real magic of Olivier Salad. It’s a dish that started as a symbol of luxury for the elite and somehow became a comfort food for millions—a workhorse of picnics, holidays, and hangovers. It’s history you can scoop with a spoon. A reminder that food doesn’t stay still. It migrates. It adapts. It survives.

And, true to Chekhov’s line, it becomes whatever people need it to be.