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Chartreuse Potatoes
Cut cold boiled potatoes in one-fourth inch slices, sprinkle with salt, pepper, and a few drops onion juice, put together in pairs, dip in Batter I, fry in deep fat, and drain on brown paper.
Lyonnaise Potatoes I Cook five minutes three tablespoons butter with one small onion cut in thin slices; add three cold boiled potatoes cut in one-fourth inch slices and sprinkled with salt and pepper; stir until well mixed with onion and butter; let stand until potato is brown underneath, fold, and turn on a hot platter. This dish is much improved and potatoes brown better by addition of two tablespoons Brown Stock. Sprinkle with finely chopped parsley if desired.
Two short potato dishes sharing a page, both built on the same premise: yesterday's boiled potatoes, chilled firm enough to slice cleanly. Neither works with freshly boiled potatoes, which crumble under the knife and steam rather than brown.
- Batter IThe cross-reference is to Farmer's plain fritter batter: roughly a cup of flour with baking powder, a little salt, about a third of a cup of milk and one egg. It should coat the potato sandwich and cling, not run off.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze it in a cloth. A few drops means a few drops; it is there for perfume, not flavour you can name.
- Brown paperPlain unwaxed paper bags or butcher's paper were the standard drain in 1896. Paper towels or a wire rack over a tray do the job better and without transferring ink.
- Cold boiled potatoesBoil waxy potatoes the day before and refrigerate them whole; they slice into clean quarter-inch rounds. Three medium potatoes for the Lyonnaise serves two to three as a side.
- Browning the LyonnaiseThe instruction that matters is let stand. After the initial stirring, leave the pan alone over moderate heat so a crust forms underneath, then fold it like an omelette and slide it out. Constant stirring gives you buttery grey potatoes.
- Brown StockFarmer's brown stock is a long-simmered beef stock, browned bones and all. Two tablespoons of any decent beef stock, or demi-glace loosened with water, gives the same effect: it deglazes the sugars and helps the surface colour.
- Yield for the chartreuseThe original gives no quantity. Figure two large potatoes for four people, which makes about a dozen paired rounds; serve immediately, as the batter softens within minutes.
Chartreuse in classical French cookery means a moulded dish, usually of vegetables arranged in bands around a filling, and the name is generally traced to the Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse, whose meatless diet the vegetable moulds were said to suit. By the time it reached Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book the word had thinned out to mean little more than a stuffed or paired arrangement, here two potato slices sandwiched and fried. Lyonnaise, by contrast, kept its meaning intact: the culinary shorthand for Lyon is onion, and any dish so labelled carries them. Both entries belong to the book's long section on potatoes, among a range of preparations, several of which start from cold boiled ones.