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Lyonnaise Potatoes
2 cups boiled potatoes, diced
2 tablespoons drippings
1 tablespoon minced onion
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
The potatoes should be rather underdone to produce the best results. Season with salt and pepper. Cook the onion in fat until yellow, add the diced potato and stir with a fork until all sides are brown, being careful not to break the potatoes. Add more fat if necessary. When done, turn the potatoes out upon a hot dish, sprinkle parsley over the top, and serve hot.
A straightforward fried potato that depends almost entirely on how the potatoes were boiled the day before.
- The hinge: underdone potatoesBoil them only until a knife meets slight resistance at the centre, then cool them completely — ideally refrigerated several hours. Fully soft potatoes shed starch into the fat and collapse into hash instead of holding cubes with browned faces.
- DrippingsBacon or beef drippings were a common household frying fat when this book was published. Clarified butter, lard, or a neutral oil with a knob of butter added near the end all work; plain butter alone will brown too fast at the heat this needs.
- Pan and heatUse a heavy skillet, medium-high, and give the potatoes room in a single layer. Two cups needs about a 10-inch pan.
- Don't stir constantly"Stir with a fork until all sides are brown" means turning them a few times only. Let each face sit undisturbed two to three minutes before moving it, or nothing colours.
- Onion timingA tablespoon of onion cooked to yellow first will darken further over the ten to fifteen minutes the potatoes take. If it threatens to burn, lift it out and return it at the end.
- Potato varietyA waxy or all-purpose potato — Yukon Gold, red-skinned — holds its shape. Russets fluff apart at the edges, which some cooks prefer for the crisp bits but which fights the recipe's instruction not to break them.
- YieldTwo cups of diced potato serves two as a side dish, or one at breakfast.
"Lyonnaise" in French cookery is shorthand for onions, an usage generally traced to Lyon and the region's long association with onion growing, and the term attaches to potatoes, eggs, tripe and sauces alike. By the time this book appeared, the dish had been thoroughly absorbed into American home and hotel cooking, where it was often said to be a way to use up yesterday's boiled potatoes — the same impulse behind hash and potato cakes. Its presence in a Butterick volume, published by a pattern company for the household reader rather than the professional, shows how far a bit of restaurant French had travelled into the ordinary weekday kitchen: the recipe calls for drippings and boiled potatoes, and asks nothing else.