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Lyonnaise Potatoes
Melt two tablespoons butter. Add one tablespoon finely chopped onion.
When onion is yellow, add two cups potato cubes. Season with salt and pepper, cook until potatoes are heated through, and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley, and serve.
A short recipe that assumes something the text never states: the potatoes are already cooked. Read it as a way of using yesterday's boiled potatoes.
- Start with cooked potatoes"Potato cubes" here means cold boiled or steamed potatoes cut into roughly half-inch dice. Raw potato will not cook through in the time and butter given.
- Cold potatoes hold their shapeChill the boiled potatoes thoroughly before cutting. Warm, freshly boiled potato crumbles in the pan and turns to hash.
- Pan and heatUse a heavy skillet, about 10 inches, over medium heat. Two cups of potato in a crowded pan will steam rather than colour.
- "When onion is yellow"Soft and translucent with the first hint of gold, three to four minutes. Browned onion turns bitter over the longer time the potatoes need.
- ButterTwo tablespoons is on the lean side for two cups of potato. Add a little more if the pan looks dry, or the cubes will stick and tear when turned.
- Heated through, and then someThe recipe asks only that the potatoes be heated through; a longer spell in the pan, turning only every couple of minutes, gives crisper edges.
- YieldTwo cups of potato serves two as a side dish. Scale up in a wider pan rather than a deeper one.
Anything called lyonnaise in nineteenth- and twentieth-century cookbooks means onion, the name generally traced to Lyon and the onion-growing country around it; the term appears in French kitchen vocabulary well before it reached American household books. Potatoes lyonnaise belong to a large family of recipes for reheating cooked potatoes -- alongside hashed brown, creamed and O'Brien -- which are often said to have arisen because boiled potatoes were cooked in quantity and rarely eaten all at once. That this recipe appears without any mention of cooking the potatoes first tells you how obvious the leftover was to the book's original readers.