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Lyonnaise Potatoes
Cut two cold boiled potatoes into dice. Put a tablespoonful of butter in a frying-pan. When hot, add one onion sliced; stir until the onion is a golden brown. Add the potatoes, cook slowly until the potatoes are lightly colored, sprinkle with salt. Turn into a hot dish, sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve. These are exceedingly nice served with broiled steak, fried chicken or fried liver. POTATOES, à la HOLLANDAISE.
Peel six good-sized potatoes and cut them in balls with a potato scoop. Throw the balls in boiling water and boil five minutes. When done, drain, put in a saucepan, add two tablespoonfuls of butter, put them on the back part of the range, shaking occasionally until the potatoes absorb the butter entirely and they are thoroughly tender. Turn into a hot dish, pour over Sauce Hollandaise and serve with baked or boiled fish.
POTATOES, à la DUCHESSE. 2 cups of mashed potatoes, 2 eggs, 2 tablespoonfuls of butter, 1 teaspoonful of salt, 1 teaspoonful of sugar.
Add the butter, salt and sugar to the potatoes, mix and stir till light, then add two eggs well beaten. Form into oval cakes, brush the tops with melted butter. Place them on a greased paper and run them in the oven until the tops are nicely browned. Serve with fricassee of chicken or rabbit.
Three separate potato dishes run together in one paragraph, all built on the same premise: the potato is cooked first, then finished in butter. The instructions assume a coal range with hot and cool zones, which is the main thing to translate.
- The hinge: start with cold potatoesLyonnaise depends on boiled potatoes that have gone completely cold, ideally refrigerated overnight. Warm boiled potato is too moist and fragile; the dice collapse into mash in the pan instead of taking colour.
- Onion first, then patienceTwo cold potatoes and one tablespoon of butter fill a small pan. Brown the onion, add the potatoes, then leave them alone in a single layer for several minutes at a time rather than turning constantly. The recipe says to cook slowly to a light colour, so keep the heat low to moderate; figure 15 to 20 minutes, and add more butter if the pan goes dry.
- "The back part of the range"On a wood or coal range this was the coolest zone, well off the firebox. On a modern hob it means the lowest setting, or a pan set on a diffuser. The Hollandaise potatoes are meant to steam gently in butter without frying.
- Potato scoopA melon baller. Six large potatoes will yield a surprising amount of trim — save it for soup or mash rather than throwing it out. Five minutes of boiling only part-cooks balls of this size; the butter stage finishes them, so test one before serving.
- Oven for the DuchesseNo temperature is given. Around 400F (200C) until the tops are nicely browned, roughly 15 to 20 minutes, suits. 'Greased paper' means buttered paper on a baking sheet; parchment will serve.
- The sugar is not a misprintA teaspoon of sugar in two cups of potato is what the book prints, and it is far too little to sweeten the dish. It can be left out without harming the texture.
- Piping instead of shapingDuchesse potatoes are usually piped through a large star tube today, which is why they are associated with browned ridges. Hand-formed oval cakes as written brown less dramatically; brush them well with butter.
- YieldThe Lyonnaise serves two as a side. The Hollandaise potatoes serve four to six, and the Duchesse mixture makes about eight to ten cakes.
Lyonnaise means, straightforwardly, in the manner of Lyon, and in nineteenth-century French cookery the term signalled onions in butter — the same logic gives us sauce lyonnaise and lyonnaise tripe. Its arrival in American and English household books came with the broader vogue for French service and French names that swept respectable cooking in the second half of the 1800s, which is why a plain fried-potato dish sits here alongside à la Hollandaise and à la Duchesse. All three depend on a fact of the coal-range kitchen: potatoes were boiled in quantity, and leftovers were a daily reality. Books of this period return again and again to what to do with cold boiled potato, and frying it in butter with onion was the answer that stuck.