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POTATOES (a la Lyonnaise)
First boil and then peel and slice some potatoes. Brown the slices in the frying-pan with a little butter or dripping, and serve them with an onion sauce (see SOUBISE SAUCE) poured over, with the addition of a little vinegar or lemon-juice.
A short entry that leans on a cross-reference: the potatoes are simple, the sauce does the work. Read the soubise entry before you start, because the sauce takes longer than the potatoes.
- Boil first, cool before slicingBoil the potatoes whole in their skins until just tender, then let them cool for at least half an hour before peeling and slicing. Warm boiled potato crumbles under the knife; chilled slices hold their shape and brown far better.
- Choose a waxy varietyYukon Gold, Charlotte or red-skinned potatoes slice cleanly and fry without disintegrating. A floury baking potato will fall apart in the pan.
- DrippingBeef or bacon dripping was the everyday frying fat of the period and gives the dish more character than butter alone. Clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, prevents the milk solids burning at frying heat.
- Slice thickness and pan disciplineCut about a quarter-inch thick, get the fat properly hot, lay the slices in a single layer and leave them alone until the underside is set and brown. Crowding steams them; turning too early tears them.
- Soubise sauceSoubise is generally an onion puree bound with a white sauce: onions cooked slowly in butter without colouring, then sieved and combined with bechamel. It should be smooth and pale, not a brown fried-onion mixture. Check the book's own soubise entry for its exact proportions before starting.
- The vinegarThe acid is the point of this version: a teaspoon or so of white wine vinegar or lemon juice stirred into the finished sauce cuts the butter and onion. Add it off the heat and taste, since a cream-based sauce turns sharp quickly.
- ServingPour the sauce over at the table rather than in the pan, or the browned faces soften immediately. Two pounds of potatoes serves four as a side dish.
- Not the usual LyonnaisePotatoes lyonnaise today usually means potatoes fried with sliced onions and no sauce. If that is what you want, fry the onions separately until golden and toss them through the potatoes at the end.
Lyon has long been associated in French cooking with onions — a garnish or dish labelled a la lyonnaise generally signals them, whether in a potato saute, an omelette or a tripe dish. Cassell's version is a more elaborate reading than the modern one: instead of simply frying onion with the potato, it borrows soubise, the sieved onion-and-white-sauce preparation traditionally credited to the household of the eighteenth-century Prince de Soubise, and sharpens it with vinegar. That cross-referencing is characteristic of the New Dictionary of Cookery, which was built as an alphabetical reference rather than a narrative cookbook and assumes the reader will turn to the sauce entry. Boiling potatoes before frying them would also have suited a kitchen with cold cooked potatoes to hand, though the recipe itself simply directs the cook to boil them first and says nothing about leftovers.