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Lyonnaise Potatoes
6 boiled potatoes 2 tablespoons butter 1 onion chopped fine 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon minced parsley 1/4 teaspoon lemon juice Cook butter and onions in an omelet pan, add the potatoes and seasoning, mix well and saute a nice brown. Just before serving add parsley and lemon juice.
A straightforward skillet potato dish; the only real variables are the potato's temperature and how much you disturb the pan.
- Cold potatoes onlyCold potatoes work best -- Boiling the potatoes ahead and chilling them helps. Warm, freshly boiled potatoes are looser and more likely to break up in the fat; cold ones slice cleanly and hold their edges. The recipe itself specifies only "boiled potatoes."
- "Omelet pan"The term meant a heavy, shallow, sloped-sided iron or steel pan kept smooth for eggs. Any well-seasoned cast iron or heavy skillet, 10 inches or so, does the same work.
- Cut and quantitySix medium potatoes is roughly 2 lb. The recipe does not specify a cut; slices about a quarter-inch thick suit the pan. That fills a 10-inch pan; more than that and they steam rather than brown.
- Order of operationsTwo tablespoons of butter will scorch before the onion softens over high heat. Cook the onion gently until translucent, then raise the heat for the potatoes, or soften the onion separately and return it near the end.
- Let them sitThe hinge of the dish is restraint. Spread the slices, leave them alone three or four minutes until a crust forms, then turn in large lifts with a spatula rather than stirring.
- Butter is thin for the jobTwo tablespoons is spare for 2 lb of potato. A spoonful of a neutral oil alongside the butter raises the smoke point and gives more even browning without changing the flavor much.
- The lemon juiceA quarter teaspoon is a very small amount in this quantity; the recipe has it added just before serving, along with the parsley, rather than cooked in.
- YieldServes four as a side, or two at breakfast with eggs.
The name simply means "in the style of Lyon," the French shorthand for onions, and it attaches to a whole family of dishes — lyonnaise potatoes, sauce lyonnaise, tripes à la lyonnaise — where onion cooked in butter carries the flavor. It is generally thought to have reached American cookbooks through the restaurant French that shaped hotel and boarding-house menus in the late nineteenth century, and by the time this book appeared it was thoroughly domesticated: a way of using yesterday's boiled potatoes that sounded rather grander than hash. Its presence in a flour miller's promotional cookbook, among plain vegetable recipes, shows how far that borrowed vocabulary had traveled into ordinary kitchens, where the cook was expected to know what an omelet pan was.