“Herring under a fur coat” is a popular Russian salad of salted herring and vegetables. About the mid 70-es of the last century the salad became a traditional dish for the New Year and holiday tables.
Salads with ingredients typical of “Herring under a fur Coat”, were distributed in the first half of the 19th century in Scandinavian and German kitchens, and were called “herring salad”. The author of Russian variant of the salad is a merchant Anastas Bogomilov, who owned several pubs in Moscow. Drunken fights happened very often at those pubs. Then he decided to come up with a dish, that would be nourishing and unite different segments of the population. His chef, Aristarkh Prokoptsev, put together salted herring, which symbolized the proletariat, potatoes which symbolized the peasantry, beets symbolized red color of the Bolshevik flag. The name of a new salad was “Shuba”, an acronym for “Shovinismu I Upadku – Boikot I Anafema”, what means “Death and Damnation to Shavinism and Degradation. “Shuba” was served for the first time on the Eve of 1919 New Year. Continue reading ““Herring under a fur coat””
