Home › Vegetables › Tomatoes Lyonnaise
Tomatoes Lyonnaise
Peel ½ dozen firm tomatoes of medium size and cut into eighths. Peel and chop rather coarsely 2 Bermuda onions or use I small Spanish onion. Put the latter in a frying-pan with I large tablespoonful of butter and cook very slowly, stirring occasionally, until the onion begins to change color. Add the tomatoes and a high seasoning of salt and pepper; draw the pan forward and cook more rapidly for about twenty minutes or until the tomatoes are quite tender.
Add ½ cupful of strong beef stock and simmer for five minutes longer. Sprinkle in 1 tablespoonful of finely chopped parsley and turn into a serving dish.
A straightforward stewed tomato and onion side dish, complicated only by a printer's error in the quantity and by stove language that no longer means anything on a gas hob.
- On the tomato countThe printed page reads "½ dozen" tomatoes, as our text now gives. Six medium tomatoes balance the butter, onions and stock, and yield about four servings.
- "Draw the pan forward"On a coal or wood range the top plate had hotter and cooler zones, and drawing a pan forward generally brought it nearer the fire, i.e. raised the heat; the recipe's own "cook more rapidly" confirms that is what is meant. Cook the onion over low heat, then bring the pan up to a brisk simmer once the tomatoes go in.
- Bermuda and Spanish onionsBoth are large, mild, sweet onions. A single large sweet onion, or two ordinary yellow onions cooked a little longer, will do the same work. The point is sweetness without sharpness.
- Peeling the tomatoesScore the skins, drop into boiling water for fifteen to twenty seconds, then into cold water; the skins slip off. Skins left on will curl into tough shreds through the twenty-minute cook.
- Strong beef stockThis means a reduced, well-flavoured stock, not a thin broth. Use a good unsalted beef stock reduced by a third, and hold back on salt until after it goes in.
- Watch the liquidModern supermarket tomatoes can be juicier than well-ripened field fruit. If the pan is soupy at twenty minutes, cook uncovered until it is a loose, spoonable stew before adding the stock.
- Butter quantity"A large tablespoonful" suggests a generous rather than level spoon; something in the region of 15-20 g. Keep the heat very low and stir occasionally, as the recipe directs, so the onion softens without colouring too fast.
- YieldWith six tomatoes, four side servings. Good alongside roast or grilled meat, or on toast.
"Lyonnaise" on a menu means onions, a shorthand associated with nineteenth-century French restaurant cooking and named for Lyon, a city long linked with onion cookery. By the time this recipe appeared the term had travelled well beyond French kitchens, and attaching it to a pan of stewed tomatoes and onions gave a plain vegetable dish a bit of restaurant polish. The half-cupful of strong beef stock gives body and savour to vegetables that would otherwise be plain. Bermuda onions, shipped to the American East Coast from Bermuda in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were a standard mild onion for recipe writers of the era, before large sweet varieties were widely grown on the mainland.