Make Potato Salad Latin American Style With This Canned Vegetable
If your potato salad feels a little blah, it may be time to add something that will give it both visual flair and a huge taste upgrade: canned beets. While in the U.S. canned beets may be associated with 1960s side dishes, across Central, South America, and the Caribbean, it's a standard addition to potato salad.
Like many other potato salad recipes from around the world, the various Latin American and Caribbean versions usually include boiled potatoes, a mayonnaise-based sauce, and a must-have ingredient for old-fashioned potato salad, hard-boiled eggs. But, depending on the recipe and country of origin, they also often include peas, cooked carrots, celery, red onions, green beans, and cilantro or parsley. What they tend to have in common, besides the beets and many other similar ingredients, is the name ensalada Rusa, or in Haiti, salade Russe, which all translates to "Russian salad" and has a history related to a potato salad found in that country. (Panama seems to be the one outlier since there it's called ensalada de faria — fair salad).
From Russia with beets?
According to many food historians, the origins of this Latin American potato and beet salad begin with Lucien Olivier, a chef of Belgian-French origin, who was the head chef and owner of the famed Moscow restaurant the Hermitage. In 1862, he came up with a mayonnaise-based salad filled with game birds, truffles, caviar, and other fancy ingredients and finished off with crayfish tails, which was a hit with his chic and wealthy Russian clientele. Before long, a scaled-back version of this salad made with potatoes and other root vegetables migrated to neighboring countries under the name Russian salad, and to this day, some version of the salad can be found in many parts of Europe. Eventually, it landed in Spain just a few years later, where it became popular.
The salad then came to the Caribbean, and Central and South America (we found a mention of the salad in a 1894 Puerto Rican newspaper). The beet-studded salad became popular throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Now you can dress up your own potato salad with little more than a can of beets, and you can build off our old-fashioned potato salad recipe to get things started.
