How to Turn a Dutch Salad into a Meal

Women who have experienced the suffering of war will tell you that the one thing they learned was to never waste one grain or morsel of food. Nothing should be thrown away and left-overs shall be tomorrow's masterpieces.

Take a look at the unusual combination of ingredients in this Dutch salad (called Huzarensla) with an Indonesian touch: pineapple chunks, fried onions with sugar, potatoes, vinegar, hard boiled eggs, pineapple juice and peas etc. The Dutch used their left-over meat like chicken or ham while the Indo people eventually liked the taste of steak much better.

Ingredients:

1 lb. steak (use your favorite)
1 large onion, diced
1 large can pineapple chunks
7 eggs, hard-boiled
quarter C. pineapple juice
5 Tbsp. butter
1 (15oz) can beets, stringed
half C. sugar
2 (15oz) cans green beans, cut
salt and pepper to taste
2 (15oz) cans carrots, sliced
2 Tbsp. mustard
5 medium dill pickles, sliced
1 C. mayonnaise
7 medium potatoes, cooked*
Vinegar to taste
You can also add a can of peas if you like.

Boil the potatoes in skin, then peel when done. Don't overcook. Cut into small cubed chunks.
Preparation:

Fry steak in large frying pan with some butter. Take out of the pan and cut into bite-size pieces (or even smaller). Set aside. Fry the onions in the juices of the fried steak for just about a half a minute. Remove from heat. Add sugar, mayonnaise, eggs (finely crumbled with a fork), salt, pepper, mustard, and vinegar.

In large bowl, place the pineapple chunks with only the quarter cup of its juice and add remaining ingredients to the bowl. Mix well. Gently add the egg and sugar/onion mixture and mix well again. Refrigerate overnight. Serve over red romaine lettuce leaves.

Huzarensla is a traditional Dutch potato salad. However, the Indo people (Dutch-Indonesian) have creatively added their own touches and turned this salad into a meal of its own. For the most part, after World War II when money was scarce, women in Indonesia added whatever they had to the pot.

What was even more unusual, and delightfully so for the pallet, was that nothing was wasted. This included all of the pineapple juice (even though we have listed only a quarter C.) from the cans, the fat portion (not recommended now) from the steak and all its juices. The onions are fried in the steak's juices and the egg mixture was thrown in the toss.

In any case, you will find that in the Dutch recipe there are only about half the ingredients and the method of preparation is slightly different. For the most part nothing except the potatoes is cooked (unless of course you count the meat which was a left-over) and they have excluded the delicious egg salad mixture. It is after all a Dutch potato salad which our Indo moms and grandmas were forced to re-create using anything and everything at their disposal because of a war they were never meant to suffer through.