What the heck is ‘herring under a fur coat’?

The name alone is striking, but a glimpse and taste of herring under a fur coat is unforgettable. Known as selyodka pod shuboy in Russian, the salad features layers of salt-cured herring, grated potatoes, carrots, onions and beets, topped with a cheerful dose of beet-dyed, bright pink mayonnaise and, typically, finely grated hard-cooked egg.

With such a name, there is bound to be history, and this is where it gets dicey: A commonly cited legend involves a Moscow bar owner who, around 1919, needed something to keep his patrons from becoming too intoxicated; one of his chefs came up with the dish and named it SH.U.B.A., an acronym for a phrase poetically rendered as "boycott and damnation to chauvinism and decadence" (shuba also happens to mean "fur coat" in Russian). The people loved it, and the name morphed into herring under a fur coat.

Or does the story begin in mid-19th-century Russia, when chopped salads dressed with mayonnaise (think Salad Olivier) were in vogue? That's the word from historians Olga and Pavel Syutkin, who in their 2015 "CCCP Cookbook" write: "While the origins of herring salad are pre-Revolutionary, its culinary transformation occurred in the 1960s," when an unknown chef started layering herring — a plentiful and high-quality food at the time — into chopped salads, with lots of mayonnaise in between.

It seems history, much like the present, is murky and complicated. But in the restaurants where it's served, the dish is unequivocally popular — at least among Russians.