chez gorgeoux: the mighty salad Tweet

The boeuf salad is a traditional New Year's Eve dish in many (Southern at least) Romanian houses. In ours, it suffered several changes. First of all, it has no beef anymore, perhaps because many many years ago it was hard to find and better used in a stew, or because even when you found it, it was mean beef, the kind you had to boil for long hours to make edible—even today, a proper beef steak is nearly impossible to get in Bucharest.

Secondly, my father's diet requested the peas were left out. Thirdly, my parents stopped doing pickles and no proper pickled bell pepper can be bought—I can testify for this part—, so the only pickle left is the gherkin. Fourthly, I'm not sure that was celeriac in the original recipe; either way, there's plenty of it today. Fifthly, my sister and I won't be around for New Year's Eve this year, so we're regaled with the salad on Christmas.

What hasn't changed? There are still carrots and potatoes, and plenty of fresh, homemade mayonnaise. Also, my mom makes several kilograms (towards 7?) of the thing because most of the family tends to eat nothing else for a while—it's that good, and it gets better as days goes by. And if you read the brief Wikipedia entry, we've never ever eaten this next to fried meats: both would suffer.

To help mom in the kitchen against her will and keep dad busy with more appealing stuff on his birthday's eve, my sister and I chopped the monster down yesterday. In previous years, it wasn't a rare sight to find us all chopping at it in the kitchen. The sheer volume of veggies made me think that Romanian Christmas is mainly about cooking a lot of food, eating a lot of food, and then swearing a lot that we won't do it anymore. Then again, what Christmas isn't around food?