Herring under a fur coat salad – selyodka pod shuboy or just shortly shuba – is a very popular Slavic salad. This salad is usually cooked by most the families for New Year celebration. It’s a layered salad that consists of cooked and grated vegetables: beet, carrot, potato, also herring fillets, and mayonnaise between the layers.
This wonderful salad just celebrated its 100th anniversary. It was served for the first time on the eve of the 1919th New Year.
The author of the salad is the merchant Anastas Bogomilov. He was the owner of popular Moscow canteens and taverns. It was his brilliant idea to create a salad with ingredients that were so common in Slavic cuisine and loved by all people.
These days many variations of the recipe exist, but I prefer the classic one.
The salad should be prepared in advance to enhance the flavors of the layers. I usually make it at least 6 hours in advance.
You will need to use a big flat dish to arrange the salad. If you have a transparent glass dish, it would be the best choice for this layered salad so all layers will show up.
Ingredients:
- herring fillets in oil about 300g
- 1/2 small white onion (about 1 Tbsp of finely diced onion)
- 2 medium potatoes
- 2 medium carrots
- 2 medium beets
- 1 cup mayonnaise
- scallions to garnish
Cooking Directions:
- In a saucepan, boil not peeled beets for about 1 hour or until they are soft. For medium-sized beets, 1 hour of cooking time should be enough. For bigger beets, you may need to cook them longer. Allow beets to cool completely and then peel.
- In a separate saucepan, boil not peeled potatoes and carrots for about 20 minutes, or until they are soft. Allow vegetables to cool completely and then peel.
- Slice the herring fillets into small 1/4-inch pieces and arrange them on a flat dish as an even layer.
- Finely dice the white onion. Sprinkle evenly over the herring layer.
- Using the medium holes of a box grater, grate the peeled potatoes over the dish and evenly spread with a fork across the previous layer. Make sure you don’t push the potato down hardly, keep the layers fluffy. The fluffier the layer the tastier the salad.
- Now it’s time to make the first layer of the mayonnaise. I put all mayonnaise into a plastic zip bag, zip it, then cut a corner to make a very small hole. So I spread evenly about 1/3 of the mayonnaise across the potato layer through that small hole.
- Grate the peeled carrots as the next layer, spread it evenly, and lightly cover with another layer of mayonnaise.
- Finally, grate the peeled beets, evenly spread over the carrot layer, and cover with the remaining mayonnaise.
- Use the back of the spoon to thinly and evenly spread the mayonnaise on the top of the beets.
- Garnish with chopped scallions.
I don’t add any salt or pepper to the salad between layers. Enough salt comes from the herring and mayonnaise.