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Hashed Brown Lyonnaise Potatoes
Finely hash up six cold boiled potatoes and keep on a plate. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, add one finely chopped onion and lightly brown for three minutes, then add the potatoes. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, evenly sprinkled over, then nicely brown them for ten minutes, occasionally tossing them meanwhile. Give them a nice omelette form, brown for eight minutes more, turn on a hot dish, sprinkle a little freshly chopped parsley over and serve.
A straightforward potato dish whose only difficulty is patience: the browning is the recipe, and rushing it gives you pale, broken potato instead of a crust.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon. That is a generous amount by modern habit; scale back if you prefer.
- The potatoesCold boiled potatoes are essential, not incidental. Boil them the day before and refrigerate; warm or freshly cooked potatoes release starch and turn to mash in the pan. Waxy or all-purpose varieties hold their shape best.
- "Finely hash up"Chop into small dice, roughly quarter-inch, rather than grating or shredding. This is not the long-stranded hash brown of a diner griddle.
- One tablespoon of butter is not enoughFor six potatoes in a modern pan, allow three or four tablespoons of fat, or add a spoon of oil to keep the butter from burning over the eighteen minutes of browning. A heavy, well-seasoned pan helps, though the original specifies nothing more than a frying pan.
- Heat and panMedium to medium-high in cast iron or another heavy skillet, ten inches or more so the potatoes sit in a shallow layer. Crowding steams them.
- "A nice omelette form"After the first browning, press the potatoes into a compact oval cake toward one side of the pan, shaped as an omelette is shaped; the recipe does not say whether it is folded over. The final eight minutes set that shape and build the crust, so leave it alone during this stage rather than tossing.
- Turning outSlide the cake onto the hot dish rather than lifting it with a spatula, or invert the pan over the plate. It will crack if handled in the middle.
- YieldSix potatoes serves four generously as a side, or two or three as a supper dish with eggs.
Lyonnaise, in French kitchen shorthand, simply means "with onions" — the cooking of Lyon is generally said to lean on them heavily enough that the city's name became the label for the treatment, applied to potatoes, tripe, sausage and salads alike. What makes this version worth noting is the hyphenation of two traditions in the title: hashed brown is American boarding-house language of the later nineteenth century, while lyonnaise claims the French pedigree, and the instruction to give the potatoes "a nice omelette form" points squarely at the French side of the family. Cookbooks of this period often shuttle between the two vocabularies on a single page. The dish also reflects an economy that assumed leftovers: cold boiled potatoes were a standing household surplus, and a whole class of recipes existed to turn them into something worth putting on a hot dish.