Salad "Cheburashka": who is the author of the salad and which option is correct?

2024 Author: Isabella Gilson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:14

On the Internet, interested readers and culinary lovers can find two (or more) options for cooking Cheburashka salad: with chicken and prunes, but there is no confirmation of which one is real and who is the creator. At the same time, it is not at all indicated why the dish received such an unusual name for a salad.

Option 1

This Cheburashka salad recipe is with prunes, but without meat, so it is suitable for vegetarians. For cooking you will need:

• One hundred grams of prunes and walnuts each.
• Four boiled eggs.
• 150 grams of hard cheese.
• Two Simirenko apples, they are green with sourness, which sets off the taste of the salad well.
• A few tablespoons of mayonnaise.

Soak prunes in boiling water for ten minutes and then dry with paper, cut into strips, grate cheese with large holes. Peel apples, remove seeds and cut into strips. This Cheburashka salad recipe is puff, the products are laid out in layers in this order:

1. At the bottom of the dish is a layer of cheese, whichcovered with a mesh of mayonnaise.
2. Sliced egg whites on top of it and another layer of mayonnaise sauce.
3. A layer of apples.
4. Nuts crushed to small crumbs. Cover this layer again with mayonnaise and sprinkle with grated egg yolks.

In this form, the salad is infused for no more than half an hour and is served at the table. Thanks to the combination of high-calorie foods, it is quite satisfying, but does not burden digestion, even despite the presence of mayonnaise. Why the lettuce is so named is unknown, but if you draw on the idea that the lettuce in the section looks rather “furry”, then you can turn on your wild imagination and decide that this is the color of the fur of a cartoon animal.

Option 2

The second version of the Cheburashka salad is with chicken, but now there is no prunes in it, so it is difficult to draw a parallel between the similarities. The only ingredients that appear in both recipes are walnuts, cheese and mayonnaise.

For the Cheburashka salad, according to the second option, the following products are needed:

• 350 g boiled chicken fillet, cut into strips.
• One large fresh cucumber, cut in the same way.
• 1 -2 eggs, hard boiled and chopped into pieces.
• One large onion, very finely chopped.
• 200 grams of pickled mushrooms (any kind), if the mushrooms are large - cut into slices, if small, then you can put the whole salad.
• One carrot, sautéed for 1 tbsp. tablespoon of vegetable oil until transparent.
• One hundredgrams of grated hard cheese.
• A handful of chopped walnuts.
• Mayonnaise.

All ingredients, except cheese and nuts, are combined in a bowl until the products are evenly mixed. Further, on a wide dish, the mass is laid out in the form of Cheburashka - the salad will look like the hero of a famous cartoon. Forming is conveniently done with two spoons, directing the mass in the required direction. Then the whole salad is sprinkled with grated cheese, on top of it - with nuts (probably imitating Cheburashka fur, the salad is quite similar in the photo). Eyes and a nose are made from olives, and an oval of the face and breast are made from a small amount of carrots, grated on a fine grater.

It's strange that a dish with such a complex combination of products has a frankly childish design, clearly intended for a children's table.

Little-known versions

There are also variations on the theme of these two recipes, in which the chicken is replaced with smoked sausage, fresh cucumbers with pickled ones, carrots and sweet peppers are added to the apple salad, certainly orange, probably to match Cheburashka's fur coat (only nothing that he is brown?). Mayonnaise is replaced with yogurt or kefir, the shape of the cut changes, the layers go away and are replaced by the usual serving of a slide in a salad bowl, but the essence remains the same.

Where is the truth?

Both Cheburashka salads deserve a place in the cookbook due not only to the originality of the presentation, but also to their taste, but it is not known which one is real and which one is an amateur variation.

But in one culinary blog, the author, with sarcasm and not without humor, talks about the creation of the Cheburashka salad, they say, this is her brainchild, which shamelessly stretched across the World Wide Web without reference to the author. Truth or a clever publicity stunt is unknown. Most likely, both dishes developed in parallel in different places, like non-Euclidean geometry from Lobachevsky and Gauss, because science has confirmed the fact of a multiple discovery a long time ago, and why is cooking worse?