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

On the Internet, interested readers and culinary enthusiasts can find two (or more) options for making Cheburashka salad: with chicken meat and prunes, but there is no evidence 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 number 1

This recipe for Cheburashka salad is with prunes, but without meat, so it’s suitable for vegetarians. To prepare you will need:

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

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

1. At the bottom of the dish is a layer of cheese, which is covered with a mesh of mayonnaise.
2. On top of it, squirrels from eggs, cut into strips, and another layer of mayonnaise sauce.
3. Layer of apples.
4. Nuts, crushed to small crumbs. This layer is again covered with mayonnaise and sprinkled with grated egg yolks.

In this form, the salad is infused for no more than half an hour and served on the table. Thanks to the combination of high-calorie foods, it is quite satisfying, but not burdensome digestion, even despite the presence of mayonnaise. Why the salad is so named is unknown, but if you pull the idea that the salad in the context looks rather “shaggy,” you can turn on a stormy fantasy and decide that it is the color of the fur of a cartoon animal.

Option number 2

The second version of the Cheburashka salad is with chicken, but now prunes are not observed in it, so it is difficult to draw a parallel between the similarities. The only ingredients found in both recipes are walnuts, cheese and mayonnaise.

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

• 350 g boiled chicken cut into strips.
• One big fresh cucumber, sliced ​​in the same way.
• 1-2 eggs boiled to a steep state and crushed into pieces.
• One large onion, chopped very finely.
• 200 grams of pickled mushrooms (of any kind), if the mushrooms are large - cut into slices, if small, then you can put the whole salad.
• One carrot, passaged on 1 tbsp. spoon of vegetable oil until clear.
• One hundred grams 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 mixed evenly. Next, on a wide dish, the mass is laid out in the form of a Cheburashka - the salad will look like the hero of a famous cartoon. Forming is convenient to do with two spoons, directing the mass in the necessary direction. Then the whole salad is sprinkled with grated cheese and nuts on top of it (probably, imitating the Cheburashka fur, the salad is quite similar in the photo). Eyes and a nose are made from olives, and from a small amount of carrots, grated on a fine grater, an oval of the face and breast.

It is strange that a dish with such a complex combination of products has an openly childish design, which was uniquely intended for a children's table.

Little known versions

There are also variations on the theme of these two recipes, in which chicken is replaced with smoked sausage, fresh cucumbers with pickled ones, carrots and sweet peppers are added to the salad with an apple, certainly orange in color, probably to match Cheburashka’s fur coat (just nothing that he brown?). Mayonnaise is replaced with yogurt or kefir, the shape of the slices changes, the layers go away and are replaced by the usual serving 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 is a variation of an amateur.

But in one culinary blog, the author sarcastically and not without humor talks about the creation of the Cheburashka salad, they say, is her brainchild, which shamelessly has been stretched across the World Wide Web without reference to the author. True or clever advertising move is unknown. Most likely, both dishes developed simultaneously in different places, like the non-Euclidean geometry from Lobachevsky and Gauss, because the fact of multiple discoveries has long been confirmed by science, but what is worse about cooking?