Olivier salad the dressing — was a jealously guarded secret, but it is known that the salad contained grouse, veal tongue, caviar, lettuce, crayfish tails, capers, and smoked duck, although it is possible that the recipe was varied seasonally. The original Olivier dressing was a type of mayonnaise, made with French wine vinegar, mustard, and Provençal olive oil; its exact recipe, however, remains unknown. At the turn of the 20th century, one of Olivier's sous-chefs, Ivan Ivanov, attempted to steal the recipe. While preparing the dressing one evening in solitude, as was his custom, Olivier was suddenly called away on some emergency.
Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar "split" the message to acceptable pieces formula_17. Then the equations have to be built. Every single equation has the same form: The next steps sign a given message formula_8 and the result is a valid signature formula_20. The vinegar and oil variables build the pre-signature formula_24. Finally formula_25 gets transformed by the private transformation formula_5 to give the valid signature formula_27. The system of equations becomes linear if the vinegar variables are fixed – no oil variable is multiplied with another oil variable in the equation. Therefore, the oil variables can be computed easily using, for example, a Gaussian reduction